Middle - Aged Gamer

The End

2010-11-23T13:15:00.000-08:00

Obviously, I'm no longer updating this blog. It was a fun writing exercise, but it's time to move on.

I've missed a lot this year - great games that needed reviewed, Ultima Online finally getting the High Seas Adventure expansion SunSword promised me seven years ago (I'm not going back to UO for it), the seventh anniversary of the unveiling of Ultima X : Odyssey, the 25th anniversary of my purchase of a Commodore 64. And so on.

I'll leave the blog up as long as it can stay up, mostly because I'm really proud of that Ultima X Odyssey team interview back in 2008. I've also been tweeting my daily game playing on Twitter (see the feed at the left), so I'm not totally done writing about videogames, I guess.

Thanks for reading, and goodbye.

Reviving This Blog

2010-07-12T16:28:00.000-07:00

Ah my poor old blog that no one reads. I have neglected it so with my lack of free time. But today, I take a shot at reversing that process by starting a Twitter account and adding a feed to this page.

Of course, someone already grabbed the username middleagedgamer over on Twitter. Their last tweet was on Christmas of last year. Oh well, you snooze you lose. I promise not to tweet about inconsequential personal things and just stick to videogaming.

Now to connect it to Facebook and see if I can get some followers. Muhahahaha!

Just Cause 2 : For The Glory of Panau

2010-05-28T12:50:00.000-07:00

I'm still very busy, but I've got to take a few minutes to write about Just Cause 2, a game that I've been playing so much of for the last two months, logging over 120 hours of in-game time and still only reaching a mere 75% completion mark on my main playthrough.

Last year I thoroughly enjoyed the first Just Cause game on my XBox 360, in spite of some repetetive gameplay and a short story mode. Just Cause 2 is a much improved sequel, sporting amazing graphics, tight gameplay, and unquestionably the largest and most amazing open world I've ever seen. The island nation of Panau is truly a gamer's paradise and the greatest electronic playground I've had the joy to explore.

The islands sport beaches, cities, villages, airports, and military bases, and terrain that varies from snowy mountain peaks to dusty deserts. There's a major highway around the main island with exit ramps and gorgeous bridges spanning long stretches between islands. There are dusty roads leading to old ruins, immense fortresses and frozen lakes, and so much more overall variety in sights to see compared to the first game.

The action on the ground is amazing, too, with main character Rico returning with an improved grapple hook. The combination of the grapple hook and parachute are so well integrated that once the player masters their use, it almost feels like one is playing a superhero game. Gunplay is tight and not too hard even on the hardcore setting, but there is no cover button, so cover must be found and utilized naturally.

Different this time in combat is the lack of enemy tanks firing upon the player as they try to take a military base, which was quite a challenge in the first game. Helicopter gunships will fly in and blast the player, but it's really easy most of the time to just grapple up and take over the chopper. There are enemies with rocket launchers and sniper rifles that can do some damage, but I found myself actually missing the one-shot-insta-kill tanks of the first Just Cause. Guess I'm weird.

The vehicles range from scooters to passenger jets, and each of them control so well that it made me a little embarrassed for the designers of other such games I've played (I'm looking at you Rockstar Games). The aforementioned grapple hook can now be used to grapple things two things, so towing a giant statue head with a tank is just another day in Panau for Rico.

Once again, the main story is painfully short, and the cinematics are nowhere near the standards of most other games out today. There are really only seven "Agency", or main story missions, and the first and last two are concurrent. Players must "cause" a lot of chaos to unlock the progression of these missions and finish the game, which in both of my playthroughs I did with only 28% of the whole game being completed. That means that over two-thirds of the game can be ignored to just beat it if that's what one wants.

I don't recommend just skimming it that way, though. There are 49 faction missions which offer some great variety as well as funny mission names (my favorite was "River Runs Red", a reference to a great Midnight Oil song). There are also scores of racing challenges for planes, cars, boats, and even skydiving, all checkpoint-based and fun to try.

More importantly, Panau is in the humble opinion of this gamer, the greatest videogame playground ever crafted. Each time one tries to take control of a small town can end up being an unpredictably wild adventure, so the best thing I can really say about Just Cause 2 is that the action is done so well that the designers didn't really need to put a thick layer of story on it just to motivate the player to enjoy it. I find myself returning to Panau again and again - "just cause" it's still fun.

Oh Yeah, I Played Mass Effect 2 Back In January

2010-03-29T15:06:00.001-07:00

In January, I took a week off of work to play Mass Effect 2. So when my co-workers were, in the weeks leading up to my vacation, asking me where I was going, I replied "All over the galaxy", and from most of them I got a weird look.
The other gamers there knew exactly what I meant.

The game itself was not only a great sci-fi game, it's just great sci-fi. The rugged space hero Shepherd once again assembles a crew to take on some great menace. Most of the game is his not only acquiring this crew, but winning their loyalty as well. There are other side missions, but not that many. Most of the planets are empty save for mineral resources, but checking out every one of them is a must in order to squeeze as much fun out of Mass Effect 2 as possible.

The creators of Mass Effect have said that it's a trilogy, which is usually a bad idea for game companies to do (did anyone ever see the last three Alternate Reality games?). However, the first chapter, the iPhone game, and Mass Effect 2 are so intertwined that for the first time in game history, it really feels like a larger tapestry is being painted here.

There are so many big and small things from the first game that carry over into the second that one can imagine the designers having a huge wall of post-it notes with strings connecting them to keep it all straight. Some minor characters return in small cameos that have a brief impact, and some of the major characters return with a huge emotional impact, giving the involved player a sense of regret that can only be experienced with the passage of time and the reality of old friends moving on.

The gameplay is less RPGish and more shooter-ish, and that's fine, because they've really refined all of those aspects and made them more fun than frustating. The cover mechanics are solid this time and the allies seem smarter. There are more variey to the ememies and the environments, and the graphics are breathtaking.

And the story is an epic of the grandest proportions, leaving the player ravenously hungry for the next installment. There's not much praise that I can heap on Mass Effect 2 that wasn't already said two months ago, but I will add that design-wise, it's another huge step forward in terms of episodic storytelling in videogames, and it's the kind of game I dreamed about playing back in the old days.

And Now, An Endorsement

2010-03-29T14:30:00.000-07:00

Weary from work and my awesome life as a husband to a wife who's ten years younger than I (careful what you wish for guys), I often arrive at Monday morning - my almost regular weekly videogame zone-out time - exhausted and struggling to stay awake even when I'm playing a game with lots of noise and explosions and pretty colors.

I gave up soda a few years ago, having consumed more Pepsi and Coke in my life than the entire nation of Liechtenstein has in its whole history, and I've never liked coffee. Red Bull and all those other energy drinks that the kids love also didn't do it for me, mostly because they tasted awful and left my stomach churning like the rough seas of the J'fer Sok (that's a reference to any Ultima Online fans out there).

So at the gas station I discovered this wondrous elixir:

It's just the thing for long gaming sessions, filling the user with mental energy more than physical jitters. I've even used it for an occasional late-night gaming session. But it must be consumed in moderation. No more than once a day, preferably only once or twice a week. The flavors that I've tried are not too bad - orange, grape, and berry - but there can be something of an aftertaste.

5 Hour Energy has become a regular part of my gaming sessions, when I'm struggling to stay awake. I wholeheartedly endorse this product for anyone who wants to maximize their free time after a long week of toil.

OK, I'm Lazy Then

2010-03-29T14:18:00.000-07:00

As a middle-aged gamer, my life is not as it once was. When I was a young man, there was work and gaming, and it seemed like I had plenty of time to stop and reflect on the hobby. In addition, there were fewer great games being released, but today it's impossible to keep up with just the really great games, much less the not-so-great-but-still-pretty-damn-good games that fly at us with alarming speed.

Seriously, they could stop releasing videogames for two years, and I'd probably still not be caught up with everything I want to play for the three console systems and three handhelds I use. Such is life, though, and for the last two months, I've been unable to muster up the basic discipline to stop playing and start writing. You see now why I'm not employed somewhere writing about videogames.

So, sorry to my two or three readers out there who probably stopped dropping by after about two weeks of seeing my little rant about Lords of Ultima as the lead story. We now rejoin my pointless and ordinary videogame weblog already in progress...

Hey, Wait, I Forgot To Review Assassin's Creed 2

2010-02-21T12:38:00.000-08:00

I beat Assassin's Creed 2 back in January, and my lazy ass is just getting into gear to jot down a quick review. I mentioned the game briefly last fall, but feel a strong need to write a bit more about it.

Assassin's Creed 2 builds heftily on the solid foundation of the first game in the series, with improved mission variety, puzzles, and combat. Graphically gorgeous and featuring smooth controls, it's a testament to the successful business model in modern game design where a thousand people come together and spend countless milions of dollars to make a state-of-the-art, polished, and playable game product.

Combat reminds me a little bit of Demon's Souls, in that one must follow the onscreen movements of one's foes and counter them with the right move. AC2 is a lot easier, though, with a variety of options to counter, disarm, dodge, and even distract - with such items as smoke bombs and sneaky moves like throwing sand in an enemy's eyes. Where in the first game I could pretty much get by with just countering, this sequel makes the action more engaging.

The platforming action is still great, with the same rooftop running and great climbing action that at times reminds me of the arcade classic Crazy Climber. The cities and countryside of Renaissance Italy are breathtaking to behold and fun to explore. And the puzzles - oh the puzzles of Assassin's Creed 2 - how they harken back to the kind of brain workout that puzzles in all those Commodore 64 RPGs had back in the day. Absolute joy.

What's new from the first game is the addition of money that can be earned by completing missions and looting corpses. This cash is spent on upgrades, weapons, and a strange side-mission town simulation, where Ezio's contributions help rebuild a run-down town.

The first game was structurally monotonous, in that the missions played out in the exact same structure in the four cities. In AC2, more variety in the structure is achieved by having cinematic story elements occur, but there is still some repetitiveness. Assasssin missions, follow missions, and others do repeat to some extent, but as with the first game it's not a problem because it's so much fun.

Big improvement is made in the future-story part of Assassin's Creed, as a bigger overall story takes center stage and leaves the player very eager for the next installment, and left me at peace with how the first game ended. Downloadable chapters "The Battle of Forli" and The Bonfire of the Vanities" roundout the Assasin's Creed 2 package. Forli is an all-out battle for one of the cities, and Vanities is a series of advanced-level assassination missions. Good luck with the boat one.

Word has recently arrived that this fall Ezio will be back for more in a multiplayer spin-off called Assassin's Creed : Bloodlines, but hopefully Assassin's Creed 3 is in the works, because that's where I really want to go next.

This Can't Be Happening...

2010-01-28T14:07:00.000-08:00

Look at this:

Lord of Ultima

It's either a whoring out of the legendary and STILL SACRED TO MANY OF US, EA! Ultima name for a browser-based strategy game, or I've woken up in hell. Not sure which, because I can't actually play it to see. The beta servers are full. It makes me feel like this:

If I get to play the game later and it is an awesome, deep, rich, RPG full of Ultima lore and legacy instead of a cheesy browser-based strategy game with the Ultima name tacked on to attract - I can't imagine anyone - then I will issue a full apology for this fearful little blog entry that hardly anyone will read.

Mass Effect 2 Initial Impressions - No More Moon Patrol RPG, And EA's Dumbass Code Redemption Rigamarole

2010-01-28T12:09:00.000-08:00

So I picked up Mass Effect 2 the other night, at the Gamestop midnight sale. Of the sixty or so people there, including the staff, I was certainly the oldest, and also noteworthy was the fact that only one person (not I) was there to pick up the other big game releasing that day, the PS3 game MAG.

So I've spent a lot of time with Mass Effect 2 over the last few days, and boy is it great. Everything that's out there in the gaming press is basically true. The characters and the story are fantastic, the combat is fun, and there's lots of cool things to do.

The hugest disappointment, though, is the omission of the moon buggy that was so much fun to tool around in in the first game. As I stated in my review, the moon buggy was a clear nod to the arcade classic Moon Patrol. In Mass Effect 2, it's gone. Instead of having the buggy dropped on a huge square of a planet and driving around to discover minerals and other hidden goodies, in ME2 the player scans the planet from orbit, and only if an anomaly is detected can the player land - in a shuttle.

The scanning is at first really very cool - the player moves a cursor over a competely 3D and rotatable representation of the planet. The controller rumbles and a graph of jittery lines spike up if the scanner is detecting one of four minerals, and at that point the player launches a probe to claim them. It is a very stylish improvement over the previous game's planet scanning, but it quickly becmes very, very tedious.

I haven't decided yet whether to doggedly chart every planet and claim every mineral as I did in the first game. So far only one planet has yielded a surprise mission outside my regular mission itinerary, so I fear the rewards may not be worth the time.

Speaking of rewards, whew....let me compose myself before beginning the next part of this.

Okay.

Speaking of rewards, there are many rewards awaiting the Mass Effect fan who kept their save files from the first installment, who pre-ordered the new game, and even rewards for those who completed the iPhone game Mass Effect Galaxy. Such an amazing synergy has seldom been accomplished in the annals of gaming, and naturally EA is there to muck it up as much as possible.

The importing of my Mass Effect game save into Mass Effect 2 was simple enough, done right upon starting the game for the first time. The reward is a true connection between the two installments. Even minor decisions I made in the first game (and had since forgotten about) are turning up as having made an impact on characters I encounter in ME2. It's an astonishing weaving of story elements, nay, a skilled execution of storytelling engineering that deserves more praise than that of an isolated little blog like this one.

And the Mass Effect Galaxy bonus content for Mass Effect 2 - that the game's characters Jacob and Miranda mention the events of Galaxy in ME2 - was easy enough to figure out. Beat the game, touch "Extras" and then "Stay Informed", and then enter your EA account info. I had to talk to Jacob in ME2 a few times before he mentioned it, but it was still a neat thing to have.

Also accessable immediately was a code for the Cerebrus Network, a built-into-the-starting-screen system for getting ME2 bonus content, one such free example of which was available on the first day, and another on the second day after release. So not only does Microsoft have a fantastic downloadable content system and code redemption system built into XBox Live, which I have used successfuly many times in the past, Mass Effect 2 has a way of getting DLC on it's start-up screen. The Cerebrus Network code came with the game, and worked within the game's startup screen.

Of course, that's because I have an EA Online account, which I've had for years, but only recently have connected it to my XBox Live account, having needed to do that when I started playing Dragon Age : Origins, another Bioware game that I'll fill you in on later (oh, there's so much to tell).

But my Gamestop pre-order bonus code, which grants me a set of armor without a removeable helmet, and a cool new gun, was quite difficult to redeem. Here's the instructions on the card that came with the code:

1. Go to masseffect.com
2. Follow the link to redeem your unique code
3. Enter your EA account info
4. Redeem your code
5. Download your item
6. Load up your copy of Mass Effect 2
7. Check Shepard's personal terminal in-game, located next to the galaxy map, for a message detailing how to obtain your pre-order item

Instead of using the built-into-the-game code redemption system, or the built-into-the-friggin-Xbox-Live-service code redemption system, this was what I had to do to get my armor and gun? Hey, whatever, let's try it!

Step 1 - Go to masseffect.com

I was immediately stopped here at a faulty "enter your birthdate" thingy. I entered my birthdate, hit enter, and the thing immediately reset back to "January 1 Year". I was stopped in my tracks by this villainous bit of age discrimination. Oddly enough, entering "January 1 2009" took me to the www.bioware.com site, but alas that was a dead end too. No code redemption to be found.

Disillusioned, I gave up and just played Mass Effect 2 without my pre-order goodies. Later, I realized what a bunch of bullshit it all was, and tried again. I changed my internet browser security, took down my firewall, and still no luck geting past Bioware's Age Guardian Monster.

But then, a Google search lead me to http://social.bioware.com/redeem/, which brought me to....

Step 2 - Follow the link to redeem your code

I saw no such link, but rather a Bioware social site of some sort that demanded I register. I started to, but then, to the right, I saw the login for my EA account. Which was really...

Step 3 - Enter your EA account info

I did. Amazingly, it worked. I rapidly proceeded to...

Step 4 - Redeem your code

I entered the code and it was accepted. Now comes the weird part. I was prompted to download my code - ONTO MY PC! For a moment, a flash of fear - had the Gamestop employee accidentaly given me a PC promo code? No, there was the XBOX Live logo right there, that couldn't be it. I nervously accepted the download...

Step 5 - Download your item

"What's happening?!?!" I screamed frantically, as downloadable content that was supposedly for the XBox 360 placed itself square on the desktop of my ancient computer. What mad world had I woken up in today? What was next? Would I have to turn on my PSP to get cable? Would my toaster be required to start my car? None of this made any sense to me and I whimpered pathetically when the download finished...

Step 6 - Load up your copy of Mass Effect 2

I already had it on. Okaaaay....

Step 7 - Check Shepard's personal terminal in-game, located next to the galaxy map, for a message detailing how to obtain your pre-order item

After you press start on the title screen, there's a display of two laptop computers. One is the aforementioned Cerebrus Network, and one is the game options (Resume, New Game, Load Game, and Extras). Under "Extras" it shows the DLC that I had already gotten, but the Terminus armor was not there. I wasn't sure if they really meant "Shepard's personal terminal in-game", so I started up my game and checked it. Nothing. Finally, I went to Shepard's personal quarters where his armor and clothing closet it, and it wasn't there either.

A little nervous still, I shut off the game and system and rebooted. Sure enough, when I restarted, there were my pre-order goodies, mentioned at both the title screen computer and the in-game one. I went to my quarters and put on the armor.

One last bit of stupidity with this armor - you can't wear it without the helmet on. Oh, it looks really cool in combat, but when you take a drink at the bar, or get a kiss on the cheek from a grateful girl whom you just helped out, it looks silly.

So that's it - my room-and-platform spanning adventure just to wear some sily bonus armor in a galaxy-spanning adventure. That DLC icon is still on my PC desktop. I'm afraid to remove it. Maybe after I've beaten the game. Plus, I'll unplug my microwave first just to be safe.

2009 Game Of The Year Awards

2010-01-18T14:57:00.000-08:00

What a year 2009 was! While much of the year for me was spent catching up with the XBox 360's vast library of great games, it was the new releases that really blew me away. We live in a time where really great games are released with alarming frequency, and even games with mediocre review scores can provide many, many hours of fun. Believe it or not, things weren't always this way, and there would often be months between game releases that were any good at all. You kids don't know how good you've got it these days.

And now the awards. As always, keep in mind that these selections are my personal opinions based solely on what I played over the last year. I neither have the time nor the money to play everything that comes out, but I came pretty close to doing just that this year, and the acquisition of a Playstation 3 late in 2009 has allowed me to pick whatever I want to play from every current generation console's game library for the first time in over a decade.

Winner : Demon's Souls (Playstation 3)

Touted as the "spiritual successor" to the King's Field series, this unique RPG by From Software certainly recreated the dark, moody and desperate medieval fantasy environments of those games, this time in a third-person view. While reviewers and players alike often cited the game as punishingly difficult, as a veteran of those King's Field games, I knew the truth. Demon's Souls is no arcade hack-and-slash, but rather a dangerous adventure that requires careful and considered exploration, measured combat moves, and clever use of the environment to survive.

Innovations in Demon's Souls include the unique use of an online server to allow players to play co-op, or even invade other player's games and attempt to playerkill them for extra challenge. Not since Ultima Online have I felt such a sense of heart-pounding dread as multiplayer PvP spilled over into my single-player game, and I loved every minute of it. Other interesting online features included the abliity to leave messages to other players playing in the same area and seeing ghost images of how they died. Demon's Souls was a refresingly different and truly engaging masterpiece that once again proved that no one can do dark and moody environments like From Software.

Runner - Up : Batman : Arkham Asylum (XBox 360)

There have been many superhero games over the years, but this is by far the best. Batman finds himself trapped in the Arkham Asylum as part of the Joker's schemes in this third-person game of smooth combat, clever gadgets, and challenging exploration. Great moves like swooping down on henchmen and hitting them with remote-controlled Batarangs make the gameplay varied and fun. Fantastic characters, cut-scenes, and those mind-altering Scarecrow sequences help take the interesting story to a level better than any of the Batman movies, and in-game collection quests provide the player with plenty of Batman lore to enjoy. The bar for superhero games has been raised to a very high place thanks to Batman : Arkham Asylum.

Runner - Up : Borderlands (XBox 360)

Borderlands is an amazingly polished and playable hybrid of frantic first-person shooter action and character/equipment developing role-playing that works far better than it should. With a visually stunning cel-shaded art style and loads of content stretched over a vast group of playable areas, I found myself shooting and looting for several weeks, refusing to leave any quest undone for fear of finishing the game too soon. There are lots of wacky characters and funny pop culture references all over the desolate planet of Pandora, and downloadable additions to the game (The Island of Dr.Ned and Mad Moxxi's Underdome Riot) have added more. Borderlands is proof that a first-person shooter can have all sorts of depth and still play like one should.

Runner - Up : Assassin's Creed 2 (XBox 360)

I finally caught up with the first Assassin's Creed game (released in 2007) this year, and while enjoyable, the repetitiveness and baffling story left me a little nonplussed. The sequel fixed all of that and established Assassin's Creed as one of the premiere storrytelling epics of this generation of games. Third-person free-running and combat across the gorgeously realized cities of Renaissance Italy reveal a story of revenge and conspiracy set against a wider historical backdrop that invites many questions about the nature of humanity. Intense puzzles, breathtaking vistas, and plenty of combat options make Assassin's Creed 2 one of the more unique and interesting games I've ever enjoyed.

Remember, it's very likely that I alone hold the mantle of the longest continuously running videogame of the year awards, so these selections join a mighty pantheon indeed!

Beaten in 2009

2010-01-02T18:32:00.000-08:00

Looking back on 2009 - wow, I beat a lot of games. Was it because of increased gaming skills, as I fuly embraced this generation's console games? Was it the sheer volume of games that I played over the last year? I don't know. Here's the list:

Farcry 2 - XBox 360
Prey - XBox 360
Grand Theft Auto IV : The Lost and Damned - XBox 360
Deadly Creatures - Wii
Just Cause - XBox 360
Resident Evil 5 - XBox 360
Mass Effect - XBox 360
Guitar Hero 3 : Legends of Rock (on Easy)- XBox 360
Saint's Row - XBox 360
The Maw - XBox 360
Assassin's Creed - XBox 360
Condemned : Criminal Origins - XBox 360
Ghostbusters : The Video Game - Xbox 360
The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion - XBox 360
Condemned 2 : Bloodshot - XBox 360
Halo 3 - Xbox 360
The Darkness - XBox 360
Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard - XBox 360
Crackdown - XBox 360
Batman : Arkham Asylum - XBox 360
The Elder Scrolls IV : The Shivering Isles - XBox 360
Left 4 Dead : Crash Course - XBox 360
Halo 3 ODST - XBox 360
Mass Effect Galaxy - iPhone
Brutal Legend - XBox 360
Borderlands - Xbox 360
Call of Duty : Modern Warfare 2 - XBox 360
Demon's Souls - PS3
Grand Theft Auto IV : The Ballad of Gay Tony - XBox 360

I'm trying to be humble here, but damn...okay, here's what I didn't beat, or in some cases, didn't beat yet:

Fracture - Xbox 360
Madworld - Wii
Mirror's Edge - Xbox 360
Harvey Birdman : Attorney at Law - Wii
Left 4 Dead 2 - XBox360
Assassin's Creed 2 - XBox360
Grand Theft Auto : Chinatown Wars -DS
Retro Game Challenge - DS
New Super Mario Bros. Wii - Wii
Shadow Complex - XBox 360

There, I feel better. Still not a bad year!

Demon's Souls - Not For The Innocent

2010-01-02T16:32:00.000-08:00

Demon's Souls is the latest RPG offering from Japanese developer From Software, whose repertoire include the legendary King's Field games for PS1 and PS2, which was a game series that myself and maybe ten other gamers in the world just loved. Rarely does a game that is so panned by critics and players find a niche audience that "gets it", but the King's Field games were just that, and the torch has now been gloriously passed to Demon's Souls.

Oddly, though, this time the critics are on board - most reviews are very favorable, but caution the masses that the game is notoriously difficult and brutally punishing. All of this is true, of course, but it's hardly news to those of us who've survived King's Field, King's Field 2, and King's Field: The Ancient City.

And it's not that the challenge comes from out-of-scale difficulty with the enemies you fight, or frustrating game mechanics. From's RPGs are masterpieces of environmental menace, of music and mood mixed to create despairing landscapes and spirit-crushing set pieces. These worlds are then coupled with a disciplined learning curve where no quarter is given to the unwary. There's a short tutorial at the start, but no coddling from that point onward. Each level thereafter is a test of the player's ability to cautiously engage it, study it, and react to it - and it's a pass/fail test.

Failure and death means restarting the entire section in soul form, the big downside of which is that the player has half of his hit points. The other big downside (there are few "small" consequences in this game) is that the player loses all collected souls earned up to that point from killing enemies. To get them back, the player must then fight their way back to the place they fell and touch their bloodstain. Failure to do that - dying again, that is, means all those souls go bye-bye. And resurrection does not mean going back to town and paying a healer. Oh no, the only way to revive and return to full health is either by using a hard-to-find gem or by beating a boss. So, much of the exploration will probably be done in soul form, and most players will just get used to it.

But these are just the rules of the game. Like the game's combat moves, like each enemy's and boss' strengths and weaknesses, once these rules are learned and obeyed, the exploration and discovery that awaits is breathtaking. From a safe central Nexus (which contains the mechanisms for level/spell/equipment advancement) the player goes forth to five distinct sections, each with at least three areas of its own, ending with a major boss battle.

In these areas the player will encounter all manner of menaces, from soldiers to monsters, to mini-bosses, and traps. The first area is one mammoth castle, which in addition to the garrison of guards awaiting the player, has a pair of pesky fire-breathing dragons to add to the mix. They tend to watch the bridges in these areas. Another area is a deep mine, another a swampy pit of poison, and so on. Each is different enough to add to the depth of the game and littered with special surprises.

Along the way there's plenty of loot to be had, some of which encourages exploration and minor puzzle-solving. There are some NPCs left in this broken world, too, some to sell the player mid-level supplies, some to be rescued, and some to be a pain in the ass. There's a loot bank guy back at the Nexus, too, who can store items, but inexplicably none of the shops buy items from the player. The game economy is based on the same souls the player collects from defeating foes, so decisions about levelling, learning spells, or upgrading equipment all must be carefully shared and considered from the same economic pool.

Certain NPC events and expereinces, as well as the use of certain items, are irreversable in a single playthrough, so decisions one makes have a heavier impact. The game's constant autosave system does not allow for saving before a critical moment, failing at it, and restarting at that save. One can quit and save almost anywhere in a section, though, so resuming at a later time doesn't mean restarting that whole section.

All of this standard but harsh RPG stuff is executed quite well, but it's still standard. Where Demon's Souls veers into new worlds of innovation is in its application of online features into what one might otherwise mistake for a single-player game. Assuming the player has the PS3 hooked up to the internet, these features are all there once the game is started up and hooked up to the Demon's Souls server.

Players can see ghost images of other players curently playing in the same section. Touching a player bloodstain on the ground shows the ghost player's death, which can reveal traps and other ways to die that lie in wait. Players can leave messages on the ground for other players, filled with useful warnings and such, and if other players recommend a message one leaves behind, the writer receives a health boost. And there's a really cool hall of heroes display in the Nexus showing the most advanced players in the world. I'll never make it there.

But wait, there's more. Players can travel to each other's games cooperatively, or even competetively. Co-op means sharing the souls and the resurrection when beating a boss. Competetive means that, while playing at full health, other players may invade your game with the intention of hunting you down, taking some of your souls, and resurrecting their own.

Not since the glorious early days of Ultima Online have I experienced such heart-pounding unsolicited PvP action. I've only dabbled in it, been invaded a few times, won a few and lost a few more, but it's an aspect of Demon's Souls that's not to be missed, and adds not only suspense and challenge to the single-player game, but replay value for future sessions.

Demon's Souls is a masterpiece of mood and suspense, a unique gem in a generation of games that while often amazing, are timid when it comes to risky innovation. Only From Software could make a game like this, and only certain players will find the level of commitment within themselves to embrace the unquestionable challenge that this title represents. It's not for everyone, but it is for anyone who wants something different and can approach the difficulty with a cautious level of humility. Players who meet these qualifications will find the rewards that Demon's Souls offers unlike those from any other gaming experience currently on the market.

Fall 2009 Wrap - Up

2010-01-02T13:04:00.000-08:00

Let's start out 2010 with another quick review of what I've been playing over the last few months. The fall of 2009 was a hectic gaming season, as usual, and my work schedule hasn't allowed me the time to write an in-depth review of each of these titles.

Mass Effect Galaxy (iPhone)
This top-down, singe-screen-at-a-time shooter from EA was a fun little diversion, introducing players to some new characters that are supposed to appear in the upcoming sequel. The battles are bookended by cut scenes and the same "choose your adventure" conversations that Mass Effect had.

While enjoyable, the adventure was short, and the gameplay suffered from drastic onscreen slowdown when the bullets were flying. While I was able to adjust my playing to the game's loss of speed during those moments, such issues are barely forgiveable in this day and age.

Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 (XBox 360)
This little-known first-person shooter did a lot to recapture the intense action and over-the-top storytelling of its predecessor, and for the most part, it pulled it off. There was one mission, however, that was so over-the-top as to be nauseating, and seems so pointless in the story's bigger picture that it all feels gratuitous.

But everything else about the game, including the extremely accessable multiplayer and the gorgeous graphics, was stunning to behold. More gamers need to to be made aware of this fledgling game franchise, so get out there and tell every gamer you know about Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2!

Assassin's Creed 2 (XBox 360)
Everything I complained about in the first Assassin's Creed game seven months ago seems to have been addressed in some manner in the sequel, which takes place in Renaissance Italy. Assasin's Creed The Next Generation's Ezio can swim, more of the background story in the future has been explained, and the missions seem less repetetive.

There are more combat options, more cinematic cut-scenes, an economic system with shops, the looting of corpses, Tomb Raider style tomb raiding, and some intense observational puzzles featuring classic and historic works of art. I've played about halfway through the game, and am once again having a fantastic time, in what is once again a unique videogame setting with great historic credibility.

Little Big Planet (PS3)
Did I mention that I picked up a PS3 back on Black Friday? Oh, I did, and it came bundled with this game and the next one I'l talk about. Little Big Planet came into my sights with not-so-little amounts of hype, and I've yet to delve deep enough into the game to say for certain whether or not the cutesy 2.5D platformer with questionable jumping lives up to it all.

I understand that it's supposed to be played online, with others, as puzzles start to show up where 2,3,or 4 players are required to solve them. There's a whole custom level design thing, and tools/items are acquired along the way for this, but I haven't the time or desire to get into that either. Nor do I really want to stop and put stickers on stuff in the game, or change my character's outfits every few minutes.

Little Big Planet is a game I may enjoy eventually - but right now the "game" seems like too much "work".

God of War Collection (PS3)
The other game bundled with my PS3 was this compilitation of the PS2 classics, the first of which I had tried a few years ago and found to be to frustrating. I tried again, felt the frustration building again, and haven't picked it up since. Maybe later.

This concludes my lazy half-assed wrap-up article. There was one more major game I've been playing, but it assuredly deserves its own write-up and will get one soon.

Sword of Fargoal For The iPhone!

2009-12-26T03:25:00.000-08:00

Sword of Fargoal for the iPhone! Sword of Fargoal for the iPhone! What more do you need to know?

Okay, fine.

Sword of Fargoal is a classic Commodore Vic 20 and Commodore 64 game by Jeff McCord, a dungeon crawler of intensely hard difficulty but addictive gameplay. I've mentioned it before on this blog.

The iPhone version, with updated graphics and a save feature, is a masterpiece, recreated by McCord and a few others with deft craftsmanship. The gameplay is the same classic top-down dungeon exploration and combat, but enhancements like the epic music and lighting effects really add to the experience.

But all that I really should need to say is that SWORD OF FARGOAL IS ON THE IPHONE! If you are a middle-aged gamer like me, or a younger pup who has any appreciation for the classics, this is THE game to get for your iPhone. Sword of Fargoal remains a fantastic and challenging game that has stood the test of time far better than most.

Beaten : Alien Invaders - Plus

2009-12-25T14:56:00.002-08:00

Every Christmas, I sit down for a few minutes with the Odyssey 2 game Alien Invaders Plus, the first game I got (other than the console's pack-in game Speedway/Spinout/Crypto-Logic) for the system, twenty eight years ago today. I play the game each year until I beat back the alien horde, which isn't too hard.

Alien Invaders Plus is the Odyssey 2's answer to Space Invaders, and it's nowhere near as good. Each wave of invaders the player faces count as a round. Beat ten rounds or lose ten lives and the game is over. The three rows of aliens consist of a small barracade row, which is indestructable, a gun, and an alien soldier. Shooting either the gun or the soldier stops them from shooting you, but the round only ends when all the soldiers are dead and the mother ship is destroyed.

The only other unique aspect of Alien Invaders Plus is the fact that once your gun, depicted at the bottom of the screen as a pyramid, gets hit, you flee as little soldier yourself, vulnerble to alien fire. If you get to one of your three barracades unhurt, you can transform it into another gun and keep fighting.

The firing patterns and movements of the invaders all came back to me after a few minutes, no doubt stored in my brain all these decades, and I again beat back the aliens. I'm sure they'll be back next year, though.

Borderlands - Polished, Playable, Perfect

2009-12-07T05:56:00.000-08:00

Borderlands is a real gem in the bustling Fall 2009 videogame release schedule. It's a first-person shooter with some light role-playing elements, gorgeous cell-shaded graphics, and character and style in droves.

Players pick from one of four character classes, each with different skills and abilities to develop. Cast onto the desolate and largely abandoned world of Pandora, a long quest unfolds amid the carnage, character development, and showers of loot that the player experiences. The rocky, barren landscape is dotted with human settlements and scrapyards, inhabited with strange critters, bands of hostile rogues, and really cool robots called Claptraps.

The world is divided into many zones, most of them fairly large, but easily accessable vehicles and teleporters make travel a snap. There are plenty of side missions that take the player into these areas, and a crude map feature makes finding your quest's destination also hassle - free. Everything that is done floods the player with loot, loot, and more loot, and a lot of time has to be spent in sub-screens comparing weapons and other items. All of these screens are well designed and accessable, and in no time the player will be zipping in and out of them with deft navigation.

Graphically gorgeous and stylistic, Borderlands looks good and moves fast. The story is light, but the missions are varied and numerous, and the characters you meet along the way are wacky and good, clean fun. There are some great pop-culture references in there, too.

Polished and playable, Borderlands is a top-notch FPS with just the right amount of RPG tossed into the mix. There's lots of loot and exploration to complement the endless action. And the first downloadable expansion, The Island of Dr. Ned, offers even more fun. It's one of those games where the player is compelled to do every side quest just to keep it from ending. Yes, Borderlands is that damn good, and I suspect that a lot of us who enjoyed it are hoping it gets a sequel.

Brutal Legend - A Strange Mix With A Great Story

2009-12-07T05:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't updated in awhile - great new games are coming out fast, I went to Dallas for a few weeks for work...you know, screw the excuses, let's just start catching up.

Brutal Legend is a heavy metal hybrid action/real time strategy game that tells the story of roadie Eddie Riggs, who finds himself cast into some bygone age where everything looks like an epic metal album cover. He starts out with an axe and a guitar, one for slashing enemies in melée, the other for rocking a few riffs from a distance, bringing bolts of lightning down on his target. The guitar also can play a few speciality riffs in a sort of sideways Guitar Hero-esque button sequence, with varying effects such as summoning Eddie's heavy metal hot rod.

The countryside opens up in stages, with plenty of side missions to explore, either on foot, by hot rod, or by riding around on the back of some of the wildlife. Most side missions are the same, but there are a few exceptions. The hack and slash action is a blast, as is the story that unfolds as you play. After awhile, the band of rebels you're traveling with goes on tour, and the gameplay changes to large real time strategy stage battles. Eddie, as a roadie should, manages these battles like a concert, creating and deploying units and managing things around the battlefield.

It's quite a shift in the gameplay tempo that works surprisingly well. It's frantic and challenging, and accessable even to someone like me who does not play those sort of games. Brutal Legend pulls this risky gameplay mishmash off seamlessly, and the player from this point out moves between the two genres as the genuinely brilliant heavy metal story unfolds.

The open world remains accessable as the main story plays out, and after the game is won. This allows the player to finish side missions and collection quests, including those that upgrade weapons and the hot rod, and most importantly add songs to the awesome metal soundtrack. The hot rod had a radio tuned into this soundtrack and I found myself taking the long way to my destination just so a classic song would finish.

Brutal Legend is a bold and refreshingly unique game that succeeds on a lot of levels. It's not perfect, but the fantastic story and the surprisingly fun gameplay brought a smile to this former headbanger's face.

Milestones : Adventure Construction Set

2009-10-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

As a college freshman whose dreams of being a videogame designer were dashed upon the realization that he sucked at math, I welcomed the arrival of Stuart Smith's Adventure Construction Set. Previewed during the spring of 1985 in an issue of Computer Entertainment magazine ( which was what the legendary Electronic Games magazine had transformed into after the Great Videogame Crash), it was one of the titles that I had to have once I had acquired a Commodore 64 and a disk drive.

Adventure Construction Set was the complete package. The presentation style was that of Ultima, and indeed that of Stuart Smith's previous games, the classic top-down tile-based one. Included were three small tutorial adventures, which served as an excellent guide to the set's unlimited potential, as well as the epic Rivers of Light, a full-sized adventure that was so good that it could have been sold as a separate product.

So what greatness did I construct with ACS? Sadly, there was no epic forthcoming from me. Oh, I dabbled for years with it, creating small environments, objects, and monsters from time to time. One game I was working on had an item that I had called the Godkiller Gas, a potion which I had cleverly concealed in the very first room of the game, and when used by the player could kill any creature encountered thereafter. It was an exercise on my part in creating a diabolical Easter egg. And while it was all fun creating such things with ACS, I never made it through the whole process and created a finished product.

I had realized that it wasn't just the math that I lacked that was keeping me from being a videogame designer. It was a lack of design discipline. At the time I was nineteen years old, working my way through college, and partying probably too much for my own good. My focus and attention span were nowhere near what they needed to be to create a cohesive adventure. In addition, ACS had some of the longest loading times of that era, further making the construction process one that required patience and commitment.

One other thing that ACS taught me was a sense of appreciation combined with pity for the designers who create these fantastic worlds that we play in. The meticulous process of world-building that I saw hands-on in ACS made me realize that the folks who made games like Ultima IV, The Legend of Zelda, and King's Field will never know the same joy that we as players know exploring them. Every hidden secret and every epic encounter that I remember was someone's line of code.

Adventure Construction Set put the power of a game designer in my hands. Like some pompous Marvel Comics supervillain cliche, though, the power of a god was too much for me and I ultimately failed to hold onto it. But it was a milestone in my personal gaming journey, and was still a lot of fun while I had it.

iPhone At Last!

2009-10-04T05:29:00.000-07:00

All that overtime has paid off, and the reward is a brand new Iphone 3GS. This weekend will be mostly dedicated to learning how to use it's many features, such as this onscreen keyboard and the ability to update this blog from the road.

So far, I'm loving this amazing device. Long ago, this is the sort of thing we all dreamed that the future would hold for us, along with flying cars and world peace. I guess one out of three ain't bad!

What I've Been Playing, When I'm Not Working

2009-09-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

Starting back in August, I worked an 11 day stretch, then was on vacation in San Antonio, Texas for six days. When I got back from that, I had a few days to play videogames before going back to work six days straight, then one day off, then six more. To summarize, I've had little time to play and less time to blog. So it's time for one of those quick-review wrap-up articles like I used to do.

Harvey Birdman : Attorney At Law (Wii)
I picked up this title (at last) when I saw it at a Half Price Books in San Antonio while on vacation. It lacks some of the depth of a Phoenix Wright title, but none of the difficulty. I'm stuck about halfway through it. It could be that I'm out of practice. The game looks just like the wacky cartoon and offers the same offbeat humor.

Mazes of Fate (Game Boy Advance)
This obscure GBA title was one I've been looking out for for awhile, and I got it at the same Half Price Books for less than ten dollars. I've only scratched the surface, but so far it's just as I'd hoped - and old school first-person dungeon crawler.

Retro Game Challenge (DS)
At a Gamestop in San Antonio, Monique and I each got ourselves a new DS game. Mine was this title, a mere twenty dollars. Retro Game Challenge is just was it says it is. Players play through challenges on old-school games. I've only unlocked two of the games, the first being a Galaga-style game that's better than Galaga, and the second an NES-era side-scrolling action platforming game.

The gameplay takes place on the top screen of the DS, while on the lower screen, you see yourself as a small child, sitting in front of the TV as you did so long ago, with your friend watching you play and offering encouragement. The whole experience is a nostalgic reminder of those simpler, more innocent gaming days. There are even videogame magazines lying around where you can read about the games you are playing and even get cheat codes and strategies. Awesome.

Space Bust-A-Move (DS)
Monique picked up Space Bust-A-Move for the DS, also for $20. In her words, it's great. It starts out easier than the other two versions we have (PS1 and Wii), but gets progressively harder, with boss battles and such. The space part comes from cosmic backgrounds and levels taking place on different planets. The stylus controls are also good, according to Monique. We have yet to try the single-card multiplayer, but I'm sure that it's fun too.

The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion : The Shivering Isles (Xbox 360)
The Shivering Isles expansion takes the already huge world of the main game and adds another vast area to explore. The Shivering Isles, a place divided between Mania and Dementia, are ruled by the charming and often hilarious Sheogorath, who rambles on in a Scottish accent as he tasks you with stopping the Greymarch. It's a great quest, more challenging at times than the main game, with new monsters and items a'plenty. I played it on and off for a few months after beating the main game, and finally finished it a few weeks ago at the end of my vacation.

Halo 3 : ODST (XBox 360)
Last week I picked up this spin-off adventure in the Halo universe, where players play a rookie Orbital Drop Shock Trooper during the attack on New Mombasa in Halo 2. I think. Regardless of my tenuous grasp of Halo continuity, I had a blast over the last few days playing through the game's campaign mode on Heroic. The ODST is no Spartan like Master Chief is, and thus the gameplay has a few differences. He heals through healthpacks rather than waiting for himself to regenerate. He can't jump as high or melee very well.

But all these differences make the game, which has the same enemies, weapons, and vehicles as Halo 3, really refreshing. Also new is the visor that helps the rookie see better at night, and adds a nice red outline to ememies. The setting is also great - the rookie walks around the battle-scarred city at night, ducking Covenant patrols (or fighting them), and looking for clues as to what happened with to the squadmates that he got seperated from at the start of the game.

When the rookie finds such a clue, the game shifts players into the role of that squadmate, and what happened to him during the six hours the rookie was out cold. It's a very good storytelling method that really got me interested in the characters, in a way that Halo 3 completely failed to do with Master Chief. Each character's adventures aren't all that new - there's a Warthog driving mission, a sniper mission, and so on - but they're still all good fun.

The multiplayer aspect of Halo 3 : ODST comes with every expansion to Halo 3 on a second disk, as well as the all-new Firefight mode (a survival mode, I think), none of which I've tried yet. Halo 3 : ODST is a great package and well worth the price for fans of the game.

Ultime Online (PC)
Yep, I'm back in UO during the current Return to Britannia program. I'm not staying. All I've done so far is sail around the changes they've made to Avatar Island in Trammel with the Stygian Abyss expansion. They basically raised a volcano on the northwestern edge of the island.

All I can say is, man, I'm glad I sold that beachfront villa I had placed there back during the Trammel Land Rush of 2000 when I had the chance. All of that pristine beach is gone, replaced by cooled lava. None of the Stygian Abyss stuff looks like anything that would bring me back to the game on a permanent basis, but as long as it's free, I can sail around for old time's sake.

Conclusion
Well, that wraps up what I've been playing lately. My work schedule doesn't seem to be letting up anytime soon, sort of like the fall videogame release schedule, so I'm not sure if my next update will be like this one, or back to single-game reviews.

Batman : Arkham Asylum Committed To Design Excellence

2009-09-11T12:22:00.000-07:00

I'm tired of all my reviews beginning with "Beaten". Looking back at my blog, almost every one of the reviews over the last year has started with that word. I'm going back to bad headline puns (wherever possible), and I'll just mention whether or not I've beaten the game in each review.

On to Batman : Arkham Asylum, then. The dark night of mediocre - to - good releases of 2009 is finally over with the arrival of this game, the best new game of 2009 so far, probably the best licensed superhero game ever made, and one helluva polished product. This game is great on every level, and yes, this morning I beat it.

Like Ghostbusters : The Video Game, the player gets to really feel like Batman in this game. Let's make these two games the watermark of how to make a licensed property work on that level. Arkham Asylum pits the Caped Crusader against the Joker and his sinister plot at the famed institution, where all the costumed villains go to get therapy (or just imprisoned). The story is fantastic - good enough to be its own movie or comic book - and unfolds with twists and turns throughout.

The gameplay has Batman walking, running, and grappling around the island and its various spooky environments in third-person view, normally, with the camera changing angles during fight scenes, and a few 2.5D side-scrolling gameplay sequences thrown in for good measure. Batman gains new gadgets, combat moves, and other upgrades throughout his adventure, and at almost all times has access to a "detective vision", sort of a tactical X-ray, night sight, and environmental analyzer rolled into one, that is so useful that I rarely turned it off.

The detective vision shows other people as skeletons, letting the player know if they are friend or foe, armed or unarmed, and dead or alive. It can be used to track wiring to security boxes, see weak points in walls, and so forth. It's a shame that it's so good at times, as the graphics of the game are also so well done that it's a shame to miss them. The voice-acting is also very good, and not to be missed.

Ah, combat. This game is the prime rib of action-brawlers, with the fighting moves that the Dark Knight has being fine-tuned to an exceptional degree. It has a simple button layout, but allows for the development of powerful combo attacks and free-flowing combat, leaving the player gleefully punching and kicking through hordes of henchmen like a whirlwind. Combat can also be honed in the optional challenge modes, short scenarios that are great for practice, as well as having XBox Live leaderboards so the player can see how poorly they fare against the million or so other players who've scored higher.

Stealth is the bat's best choice in many scenarios, and really the only way to take out rooms full of armed foes. Sneaking around in the rafters, taking out the henchmen one at a time - it never gets old. Watching their reactions, and hearing the Joker's comments to the over the loudspeakers is a joy.

While the main villain is the Joker, of course, there are appearances by other classic Batman foes, some as boss battles, and some as mere cameos of sorts. Of special mention is the Riddler, who has set up an amazing collection-quest set of challenges on the island. Batman's full arsenal of gadgets is required to get them all, and fortunately finishing the game does not prevent their acquisition.

Most of them are simple tasks like find the glowing question-mark trophies, or smash 20 of the chattering, wind-up Joker teeth laughing all around the grounds, but others require some thinking just to figure out what sort of puzzle is going on in the first place. It's by far the most satisfying collection quest I've seen in a game this generation, and I was proud to figure them all out on my own. Searching around for them is made easier by discovering the maps of where they all are in each section, but the map doesn't just hand the riddles to Batman.

Much of the collection quest opens character files and trophies, each adding to the lore of the cast of characters. The bios of each character explains their stories and abilities, and even lists their first comic book experience. Awesome.

There's also something that I can't spoil that occurs at one point in the game that filled me with absolute fear and then absolute glee. It was pure design brilliance, a totally insane moment where the developers mess with the players to a degree unprecedented in the history of videogames. Hats off to them for doing this thing. Players will know it when it occurs.

Everything about Batman : Arkham Asylum is design brilliance, though. There's great combat, a fantastic story with twists and turns, gorgeous graphics, tons of exploration in moody environments, lots of gameplay variety, files of lore to experience, and a sense that the player is really Batman for the entirety of this lengthy quest to stop the Joker.

Word is that some downloadable content is just s few weeks away, and with all the challenge modes I've unlocked, I can say that even though I've stopped the Joker's sinister plot, my time at Arkham Asylum is not quite through. The Fall 2009 videogame season has kicked off quite well with Batman : Arkham Asylum, a game that's polished and playable in every way.

Beaten : Crackdown

2009-09-11T11:56:00.000-07:00

I finally picked up a cheap copy of Crackdown, an open-world third-person game that I tried out last year when a co-worker loaned it to me, and a few weeks ago I finished it. Crackdown is yet another game in the XBox 360's growing library of classics, and while its spot on that list is well-deserved, it's a game that gets so much right while missing some greater opportunities along the way.

Crackdown casts the player as a genetically enhanced super-cop in a vast city where three gangs - a Latino one, a Russian one, and an Asian one - have all but taken over their respective turfs. The player has five abilities - agility (jumping and running), strength, firearms, explosives, and driving - that raise through natural gameplay, increasing the amount of chaos the player can cause.

The player gets to enjoy the feeling of being super-powered in many ways - making unreal jumps off of towers, picking up trucks and throwing them at enemies, and so forth - and it's really a refreshing feeling of empowerment. There are standard weapons and grenades, and they all work well in combat, pretty much.

Driving takes some practice to get used to, as the sheer speed happening on the screen often leaves the player little time to react to oncoming traffic and terrain. To be honest, I spent most of my time running about, as the enhanced running and jumping was such fun that traversing rooftops seemed like a better way about. Your mileage may vary.

The action is chaotic at times, but absolutely fun. The targeting is very rough, though. The player must manually target enemies and then lock on, as just pressing the lock on button will usually lock onto a civilian car a block behind the enemy one is facing instead of the obvious choice.

The city is a masterpiece of design, not just large horizontally, but vertically as well. Almost everything is climbable, including the vast Agency Tower at the center of the map, rising to heights so dizzying that my real-world acrophobia was kicking in and my hands were shaking. There are lots of sights to see in Crackdown, and things to collect in its many nooks and crannies.

Where most games have solid boxes as their buildings, Crackdown often constructs them with intricate passageways leading to the rooftops, and the game's several collection quests will lead the player through many of these areas in search of power-enhancing orbs. It's a city of colorful design, and it all fits well with the game's cartoony-but-detailed cell-shaded look.

So Crackdown has fantastic gameplay, great graphics, and awesome level design. What it's lacking in is story and characters, really. Sure, it's got files of lore about the overall story of each gang and its bosses, but these people are just targets and their stories are background, not having much impact on the gameplay. It doesn't take much from the game not having that depth, but it would have been nice.

Crackdown is like cake without icing, still delicious and filling, but not as sweet. And there's a twist at the end - which I won't spoil - that lead me to think that a bigger battle was about to occur, but then - nothing. The game ends, leaving that unresolved twist to a sequel. Which is on the way, so maybe the sequel will pick up the ball and run with it. Crackdown does so much right, so it shouldn't be too hard for a sequel to really shine. We'll find out next year.

Six Years Ago Today

2009-08-21T16:54:00.000-07:00

Six years ago today was the unveiling of Ultima X Odyssey, and as is tradition, I'm the only one in the world still remembering that game and honoring the anniversary of the event. I was there, it was amazing, and it shall be remembered, here at least.

I almost missed it. Really, the interview I did last year with some of the UXO team pretty much wrapped up the lingering mysteries of its cancellation. There's been no new developments, of course, over the last year.

Except one. Back in April, some promotional CD appeared on Ebay that had the musical score of Ultima X : Odyssey, as well as music from Medal of Honor : Frontlines and one other game. I foolishly thought I was the only one interested, didn't bid high enough, and got sniped. I was very much hoping to get my hands on that artifact and hear that fantastic music once again.

So here we are, six years later. Ultima X : Odyssey is just a memory, EA apparently has no plans to do anything with the Ultima franchise, other than churn out another Ultima Online expansion for their few remaining players, and all that's left of the hard work and dedication of the Ultima X : Odyssey team is one lone fan, raising a toast to them all and their unrealized vision.

What a game it would have been. Roll the movies:

We entered the hall at Yerba Buena and this is what they showed us to introduce the game:

Here's a short film about the game's music:

Here's one I hadn't seen before from Liquid Development, about world building. Some of these environments have never been seen before:

Here's EA's film of the event itself, which DID NOT happen at any E3, in spite of the title:

Finally, let's wrap it up with my own tribute film:

Beaten : Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard

2009-08-10T15:10:00.000-07:00

Released back in March of this year to mediocre reviews, Eat Lead - The Return of Matt Hazard was nonetheless a game I wanted to play very much. Trailers like this one, as well as the voice acting by Will Arnett and Neil Patrick Harris painted a picture of a game that didn't take itself too seriously, and was an artistic parody of much of the last two decades of videogaming.

At fifty dollars, though, I couldn't justify picking it up. It eventually dropped to thirty dollars a few months back, but it wasn't until last Saturday, when I saw it at Wal-Mart for twenty dollars, that I took the plunge. For that price, I can say the game was a very satisfying experience.

Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard is a third person shooter at its core gameplay, with a few quicktime events thrown in here and there. Technically, it is below this generation's standards in gameplay, if not graphics, but neither is an unforgivable issue when taken into the context of the delivery of the game's content.

There's a great cover system, but sometimes it misses what surface you want to hide behind. Enemies throw grenades at you, but you can't do the same (Matt even jokes about this design omission). Levels are big, checkpoints are frequent enough, and loading times are rarely an issue. Boss battles are often intense repeated-death sessions where it takes a lot of time and luck to figure out what to do.

As a comedic effort the game succeeds quite well in its parody of the videogame scene. It's not the Airplane of parodies in that the laughs don't come a mile a minute, but after beating down waves of repeating foes, when they do come it's a welcome reward.

Enemies come in the form of everything from construction workers to cowboys, zombies, Wolfenstein 3D-style 2D sprite-Nazis, water-gun toting commandoes, space marines, and more, each packing their own kind of in-character weapons. Speaking of which, the weapons and ammo dropped are never too scarce, and in a few places they respawn.

The story of Matt Hazard, a washed up videogame character who gets set up by a bitter software mogul, is perfect for the task at hand. There are a lot of moments in the game worth mentioning, but they are best left revealed to the player during the gameplay, and not through spoilers revealed on some obscure blog like this one.

The game even mocks the achievement system, granting achievements for just starting the game for the first time, pausing for the first time, an watching the end credits. Their names are fun, too, like the Russian Attack achievement, granted for using the AK-47 for a certain number of kills, a clear shout-out to the arcade classic.

So here's where I'm at with Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard: It was worth the twenty dollars I spent on it for a weekend of fun gameplay and a few great laughs. I personally value what the game's developers were trying to do here, and in great measure they have succeeded. I got all the jokes and the tongue-in-cheek look at not just gaming, but game development. In spite of the game's poor sales, I hope there's a sequel, and I hope that other developers won't shy away from such concepts in the future.

For the average gamer looking for just another shooting game, and not too interested in the parody of our hobby, I can't recommend it. Like me, anyone playing Eat Lead must be more into the message than the gameplay for the whole package to work. And work it does. Eat Lead : The Return of Matt Hazard was great fun and a refreshing change from so many games that take themselves too damned seriously.

Beaten : The Darkness

2009-08-09T15:13:00.001-07:00

Two weeks ago I delved into my local Gamestop's bargain bin, and pulled out a ten dollar winner, The Darkness. Based on one of those Spawn-type, dark vigilante comic books, the Darkness is a first-person shooter with a very original twist, and a story that's one of the most emotionally engaging ones of this generation.

Players assume the role of young mob assassin Jackie Estacado, who on his 21st birthday finds out he has these inherited darkness powers. These powers are cool - there are tentalces that you can send out to scout and attack foes, another tentacle attack for close-range combat and moving objects, darkness guns, and a black hole you can summon to mess up enemies. Your darkenss powers are increased by devouring the hearts of downed foes.

The powers also allow him to summon four kinds of darklings - little demon followers each with a different function. One's a brawler, one's a gunner, one's a suicide bomber, and the other goes around zapping light sources. Oh yeah, these are darkness powers after all, so as the player explores areas they have to shoot out every light source they can. The powers will cut out at inopportune times until the player gets in the habit of shooting out light sources.

Back to the darklings for a moment. Yes, they're cute, they way they jabber to each other and make little daemonic comments about things, but man are they dumber than a sack of doorknobs. You can send them to places that you target by pressing X, but they rarely do what you want. I used them sparingly, usually as cannon fodder.

The story, as noted previously, has warm and compelling moments in spite of all the bad mojo going on. I won't give away any spoilers here, but it's a masterpiece of interactive storytelling. There are great and memorable characters to meet, from old mob family members to folks in the subway who give you side quests.

There is a really cool collection quest here, too. There are scraps of paper with phone numbers on them that can be gathered. When the player finds a pay phone, they can call all of them up. There are lots of silly, humorous answers on the other end of those phone numbers, and each one unlocks some sort of bonus content. There are letters, too, that can be found and later mailed when one comes across a mailbox. I barely found half of the 100 numbers and letters hidden in the game.

In terms of level design, it's almost an open-world game, in that there are many neighborhoods, all connected by two subway hubs. Some don't open up until later chapters, but many can and must be revisited as the game progresses. The game consists of five huge chapters, two of which take place in a hellish World War I battlefield that has to be seen to be believed. Graphically and technically, that area is a gamescape unlike any other I've seen.

There are all sorts of other design brilliances that make The Darkness stand out from other games. The loading screens are little vignettes of Jackie, sometimes talking about an area the player is about to enter, sometimes about the characters, and other times just fooling around with his guns.

The televisions the player sees here and there contain actual real-world content - an old Flash Gordon serial, old Max Fleisher cartoons, a few movies and music videos. Again, this is actual content, not a facsimile. I fell asleep with Flash Gordon on, and woke up a few minutes later to see it still playing, much further into the episode. I really think that the whole thing is in there, if one wanted to watch it all. An impressive technological feat.

It took me about a week of playing to beat the Darkness. It was challenging, and never unfair, with lots of twists and turns in the story to keep me interested. This is the total package - great gameplay coupled with a compellingly crafted tale. There's a sequel in the works, but Starbreeze Studios, the ones who created this incredible game, aren't the developers. Whoever is out there making a new Darkness game had better pay close attention to what Starbreeze did here, for anything less would be a travesty.

Beaten : Halo 3 - No Really, I'm Playing Halo 3

2009-08-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

So a few years back, I had an original XBox for awhile. I didn't play much on it - The Bard's Tale, Doom 3, Stubbs the Zombie, and The Warriors are about all I ever bought for it, other than the first Halo game. I had heard so much hype about how awesome it was, so I picked it up.

I thought it was a mediocre first-person shooter at best, nowhere near what the hype had made it out to be. It was fun, it was polished, but the big story behind it all felt entirely detached from the shooting. Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when the hype swept me up once again, and I took the plunge and picked up Halo 3, the XBox 360's flagship title.

I read up on the story elements of Halo, to refresh my memory of the first game and to fill in the blanks on what happened in the second installment. Once again, the story seemed complex, and I hopped right into Halo 3's "Heroic" setting (the game described this setting as "how Halo was meant to be played", or something).

Once again, the story was there, unfolding between bullets, but it all seemed irrelevant. The solo campaign was short, but certainly challenging and dotted with moments of spectacle. Since Halo 3 is put on such a high pedestal by the gaming community, I'll be judging it more harshly than I normally would.

The story, as I've already mentioned, is a wacky, overwritten bag of sci-fi lore that has little impact on gameplay. There is really stupid ally AI at the few points in the game where there are allies. You get an alien sort-of sidekick, who at one point got stuck in a rock when jumping down from a ledge.

The game is a shooting gallery of the same enemies over and over. Some levels repeat, too, or more specifically, you backtrack through a part of a previously-cleared level at one point. The bodies and guns from your previous journey through that level are wiped by the same ninja janitors that sneak in and out of lesser games. In addition, old Master Chief doesn't manage to keep the guns he's holding onto between levels. Tsk, tsk.

So there's my harsh criticism of Halo 3. Let's face it, though - Halo 3 is a multiplayer game, and the solo campaign is just there to - um - finish the story, I guess. As a "noob" in the Halo 3 multiplayer world, I've been getting "pwned" by all sorts of pleasant people (mostly kids) from all over the world.

Multiplayer is Halo 3's bread and butter, and it's a complete package, with lots of maps and options to enjoy. I'm still, weeks later, just getting my feet wet with it all, not winning much, and slowly ranking up a little. I've resolved myself to get more multiplayer fun out of my XBox 360, and Halo 3 certainly has a large community of players whose sole purpose is to keep me humble as I progress, so it's a great place to play around.

Halo 3 has a forgettable single player game, but its real value comes from its vast multiplayer aspect. Another Halo game, ODST, arrives in September, and if I'm enjoying Halo 3 enough by then to warrant the purchase of that spinoff game, I may consider diving even deeper into the Halo universe. The story, from what I've heard so far about ODST, seems a little more compelling, and I'm sure it will expand the already vast array of things to do with the multiplayer game.

Quisp Is Back !

2009-08-05T18:31:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, around the time of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, I ran across a sight in my local Anderson's General Store that blew me away.

During that bygone era of constant space missions, where I was raised believing that mankind's future in space had truly begun, one breakfast cereal perfectly complimented the time : Quisp.

The delicious corn cereal featured a little space-guy mascot with a propeller on his head. Along with Tang, which the astronauts drank, my breakfasts were filled with my own dreams of a life of space travel. As the 1970s moved on and the space program wound down for awhile, Quisp lost its popularity and was taken off the store shelves.

I never saw it anywhere again, but remembered it fondly, not just for the childhood memories, but because it really tasted great, too. It was like a less sugary (and less sharp) Captain Crunch, with better corn flavor.

So there it was, here in 2009, at the Anderson's. Dozens and dozens of boxes. I bought two boxes the first week, and three in each subsequent week. The boxes are small, you see. Last week, though, there were less than a dozen boxes of Quisp left.

I'll probably find out this week if the Anderson's is going to restock this legendary, delicious cereal, or if it will disappear for a few more decades. I've learned, though, that I can actually order more of it online from the website, should I desire it.

Hmmm. Ordering vintage breakfast cereal through a website. Is there anything the internet can't do?

Beaten : Condemned 2 : Bloodshot

2009-07-13T19:01:00.001-07:00

It's taken me a few weeks after encountering the Condemned 2 Lost Saves Bug to get back to the game, taking every precaution to avoid a recurrence, but now that I have I can say I'm glad I did.

Condemned 2 : Bloodshot is a true sequel, taking place some time after the first game, with the main character now a smelly drunk. He again gets pulled into the city's worst neighborhoods for a creepy adventure that, thankfully, explains some of the unsolved mysteries of the first game while taking the story into a whole new direction.

When I say a whole new direction, I mean it. The story that unfolds is fantastic, with characters that come and go and motives that are revealed over the course of the game. As with the first Condemned game, the adventure takes the player through some unique and varied levels, such as an abandoned doll factory and a derelict bowling alley.

There's even a cool revisit to a part of a level from the first game, which might sound like a lazy design decision at first, but instead makes sense in terms of story, as well as earning a lot of points for having the corpse of an enemy boss from the first game lying right where you left it.

The melee combat that made the first title a refreshing landmark is expanded on greatly in the sequel, with all sorts of combo attacks added, as well as quicktime event kills and environmental kills to keep things interesting. There are more guns on some of the levels, so much so that the player can complete the level fully armed.

Sadly, but probably smartly, the taser got nerfed. It has limited charges in Condemned 2, so batteries must be found much like ammo. And when aiming anything, it's a good idea to be a little drunk. That's right, not since The Bard's Tale games has the player actually needed to keep drinking to play more effectively.

The investigative stuff is back, this time with four selectable items : A GPS, a spectrometer (it picks up sounds and smells), a UV light, and a digital camera. All of them are used in creative ways to get through the game, and the player is scored on their investigative prowess. Investigations really add a lot to Condemned games, but with both of them I was left wanting more.

The game's autosave system works well enough, but sometimes has rough checkpoints that put the player strangely far back from a critical point. Another complaint is the lack of a target reticule for throwing items. There are times in the game where an item must be thrown very precisely, and only the flashlight can provide any guidance on where to aim - and it sucks for that.

I dub Condemned 2 : Bloodshot as "The Game That Doesn't Want You To See", as the player is often in areas that are so dark that the flashlight doesn't help, or subject to sonic waves that distort everything, or forced to wear a scratched-up, vision-impairing oxygen mask. It's just silly sometimes, but I suppose it all makes sense.

Another minor complaint is that the character of Rosa has changed from a chunky, motherly, African-American woman in her thirties to a skinny African-American woman in her twenties. None of this is explained.

Minor complaints (and the major one) aside, Condemned 2 : Bloodshot is a great sequel that certainly expands on the combat, the characters, and the story started in the first one. The ending sets up for one hell of a sequel, too, and I certainly hope that there is one in the works. The two titles of the Condemned series make up this gaming generation's premiere horror experience, and there's certainly potential for it to become a trilogy that will be talked about for years.

Beaten : The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion

2009-07-13T18:25:00.000-07:00

Well, it wasn't King's Field, but it was still an epic, well-crafted gaming experience. Back in April I took the plunge and picked up The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion : Game Of The Year Edition for my XBox 360, and a few days ago, I finished it - for now.

When I first bought it, I only played through the tutorial, and then set it aside to play some other games I had received for my birthday. I knew that Oblivion would have a steep learning curve as well as bucketloads of content, so I put it off until about a month ago, only stopping for a week to play Ghostbusters.

Oblivion has a vast land full of cities, people, and points of interest, all meticulously engineered to create a richly complex virtual world. People come and go about their daily business and the player does, too. None of this is particularly new in adventure games, but the depth and detail in Oblivion really set it apart. It is without a doubt the premiere fantasy RPG of this generation.

There are quests just pouring out everywhere you go. In addition to the main storyline involving an invasion by the nightmare realm of Oblivion and its denizens, I quested through the Fighter's Guild, Mages Guild, Arena, Thieves Guild, and Assassin's Guild storylines, each almost big enough to have made their own game. You get missions with each of these, and as you progress an over-arching storyline emerges. The Thieves Guild was my favorite of these, with a great twist-ending.

There's so much to do beside these quests, and even though I beat the game, there are many more of these standalone tasks I've left unfinished. In addition, the Game of the Year edition I purchased comes with both expansions, which I'm sure offer even more hours of gameplay. I finished all the main game and guild questlines in around 70 plus hours of play.

The player can go about all of this either in first-person (like the above-mentioned King's Field), or third person, and the combat is in real-time, with swords swinging and spells flying. The inventory, map, and other screens are a complex set of interfaces that take some time to master, but it's not overly clunky or cantankerous.

The game advises players to save frequently, and I couldn't agree more. Make multiple saves, too - don't just allow the game's autosave mechanism to write over the same ones, as the game's hyper-complexity can create situations where you wish you had a earlier save available.

For example, I took on one of the side quests early in the game, which sent me to a tomb full of vampires. In this game world you can become a vampire by just swordfighting with one, and I contracted vampirism. A few days later, sure enough, my life became a nightmare, with people running away from me and a serious aversion to sunlight making my normal questing and travelling a living hell. I found out that there was a cure, but I was required to gather so many items that I found it insanely hard. I choose to go back to a save before taking on that original quest, losing about two days worth of play. I really didn't want to play as a vampire.

The game had some challenging parts and some easy parts, all of that determined by what skills and items I had, as the creatures you fight are generally scaled to your own level. The ending was epic, if brief, and the game goes on, with so much more to do and see, that it's almost like an MMO.

I'll be returning to land of Cyrodiil for more adventures at some point, but after nearly a month in that land, I need a break. The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion is a massive masterpiece, complex but fun, rich and full of detail. My only disappointment is that it wasn't a King's Field game, but then again, only From Software can make a King's Field game, and they're not doing that anymore.

Beaten : Ghostbusters The Video Game

2009-06-25T17:24:00.000-07:00

Almost a quarter century ago, I was enjoying the first Ghostbusters videogame on my Commodore 64. At the time, the graphics, gameplay, and especialy the sound were all impressive, and it certainly conveyed the feeling of actually being one of the ghost bustin' crew.

And here we are again. I picked up Ghostbusters : The Video Game for the XBox 360 at its midnight release at Wal-Mart last week (which got me a code for an in-game gold proton pack and a CD of three songs) and can happily say that this modern title once again puts the player fully into the jumpsuit of a Ghostbuster for a great ride.

Players assume the role of a new recruit to the team in a whole new story, written by Harold Ramis and Dan Akroyd, who, along with Bill Murray, Ernie Hudson, and several other stars, round out the fantastic cast. It takes place in 1991, and offers much in tribute to the two movies, as players get to re-create the battle with Slimer in the hotel and the iconic Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Times Square.

The story is good and flows well, and the laughs are certainly there. Bill Murray's character style stands out once again, as it did in the movies, but the player will enjoy some one-on-one time with each of the other team members in turn throughout the game's progression. While the script and voice acting are great, the synching to the in-game talking of the characters themselves is not, often resulting in a Godzilla-movie sort of look.

The gameplay in Ghostbusters is generally pretty good. One of the plot points established early on is that the player is not just a new recruit, but one hired to help test out some new equipment. The good old proton packs that the Ghostbusters have been using get a few upgrades along the way, selected using the d-pad. Some of them are even used for a few minor environmental puzzles, which was nice.

Actual busting of a ghost is a surprisingly fun and unexpectedly more complex game mechanic than I thought it would be. Players zap the ghost with the proton pack and wear it down, and then switch on the capture stream, and then wrangle it into the trap. And since they put up a fight, the whole expereince really feels like wrangling a ghost.

In addition, the proton pack is a piece of equipment prone to overload, so players must be careful to vent the thing lest it overload and be out of commision for a few seconds. The pack also is used like the suit in Dead Space, to convey the player's health bar and equipment status meter, which works well since the game is played in a very good third-person viewpoint.

Another pleasant surprise is the complexity of the PKE meter device. During gameplay, it is used to track and scan ghosts and ectoplasmic residue. The device is held out in front of the player, who then dons goggles to assist in the scanning. When the game is paused, the PKE meter is pulled up and viewed like a PDA, with access to game save features and options, as well as the lore of each scanned ghost. It's a good place to check for each ghost's weaknesses, and the lore itself is entertaining.

The game has some spooky environments to explore, but it's honestly very short. There are seven levels, essentially, and it took me less than ten hours to beat the game on the normal setting. There are checkpoints throughout each level, making starting over not too bad.

However, there are points of high frustration in the game where I found myself dead quite a few times. When a fellow Ghostbuster falls in battle, the player must run to them to revive them, and if they're alive they will return the favor. Sometimes the action is so fast an frenetic that players can get locked into a cycle of 90% revival (you revive them, they revive you, repeat, with little time to do much else like, say, bust some ghosts), and this can get quite tedious.

In spite of these few shortcomings, the game delivers on exactly what I'd hoped for - I got to go on a whole new adventure with the classic Ghostbusters and had a great time doing it. There's online multiplayer available, too, but I have yet to try it out. I hope Ghostbusters does well enough to warrant a sequel, because if the game's developers took what was here and improved on it - more levels, less teammate healing, driving the Ectomobile, better voice-synching - they'd have a real winner.

As it stands, Ghohstbusters The Video Game delivers what any fan of the movies would want, and I found it well worth the price. As for gamers who don't necessarily geek out on the Ghostbusters but are looking for something fun to play, I'd recommend keeping in mind the brevity of the game when considering a full-price purchase.

Condemned 2 : Bloodshot's Unforgivable Lost Save Bug

2009-06-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

After thoroughly enjoying the first Condemned game for the XBox 360, I decided shortly thereafter to pick up the second one, Condemned 2 : Bloodshot, when I saw it in the twenty dollar bin at Wal-Mart. I got in a solid day of playing with the game and haven't touched it since thanks to what I consider a catastrophic, unforgivable bug.

I had just started the fifth level when I decided to quit for the day. As I often do, I simply shut the system off, knowing that the game was saved at the end of the fourth level. The next morning when I started up the game to resume playing, all my save data was either lost or inaccessable.

It was there, on my XBox's hard drive - save data for the game. But the game program itself didn't acknowledge it. Four levels, a whole day of play, lost. I felt sick to my stomach, because an entire day's worth of playing - some of it very hard - was lost.

The consensus on the internet I found when searching for other cases of this bug was that the player MUST end their play session through the game's own menus, not by simply shutting the system off, to prevent this bug from happening. This seems so insane in light of the fact that every other game, including the first Condemned game, doesn't seem to destroy entire save files or access to them when the player just shuts the system off.

Damn, I wonder if a power outage during a play session would do the same? Scary.

An email sent to the game's creators, Monolith Productions, has gone unanswered for over a week. I asked them if they were aware of this bug, and if so, why hasn't it been patched in the last year-plus following the game's release. I also suggested that, if a patch was too much, then why not a simple warning message to keep players from exiting their games as I did? The lack of response has said volumes about what the company considers as support for their products post-release. Shameful, I'd say.

I consider the ability to wipe out one's own saves a completely catastrophic, unforgivable bug of the highest caliber. This should not have made it past testing, and certainly not to release. Once released and reported, this should have been fixed with all haste.

Monolith's failure to fix or even acknowledge this bug calls into question their other products for years to come. I enjoyed Condemned : Criminal Origins, and was having fun with Condemned 2 : Bloodshot up to this point. Both games were good and scary. Continuing to play this second title with the ever-present fear of losing all my saves, though, is really pushing the horror genre just a bit too far.

One Year With The XBox 360

2009-06-14T18:34:00.001-07:00

One year ago this evening I was enjoying dangerous amounts of alcohol with my closest friends who honored me with a bachelor party. It was at this event that they presented me with my XBox 360, a most generous gift that I've certainly gotten a lot of play out of since then.

One year with this generation's, um , well it's not the best selling console(that's be the Wii), and it's probably not the most powerful console (that'd be the Playstation 3), so let's just call it this generation's coolest console, yeah. Anyway, one year with the XBox 360 has taken me to so many worlds and given me so many memorable gaming experiences that it seems like a whirlwind.

I blasted through this generation's most epic and cinematic first-person shooter when I played Call of Duty 4. I fought through City 17 and its surroundings in Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode One, and Half-Life 2 Episode 2, a gaming experience rife with moments of absolute joy. And Portal, ah Portal. Original, refreshing, innovative, challenging, and fun, with such a devious twist at the end, and then an end credit sequence that brought tears to my eyes it was so awesome. Portal alone justifies the price tag of the XBox 360.

I tried Bioshock, and it was cool, but didn't grab me. Perhaps because it was a game a co-worker insisted I try. I bet I'd like it if I bought my own copy, and I might yet do that. Then it was Grand Theft Auto 4. Nothing ever made can compare to its size and scope, its accomplishment as an entertainment product, and its sheer amount of fun-to-play gushing from every screen. Four months, on and off, to beat it, and then later, it's downloaded spin-off The Lost and Damned.

The XBox Live service itself has been a highlight, especially when they offer up titles like Duke Nuken 3D, perfectly translated and still a blast. My wife Monique has found plenty of puzzle games on the service, which suits her preferred gaming genre.

Dead Space was another highlight. Dark, moody, challenging, with stunning visuals and well-made gameplay innovations, my romp on the Ishimura was very memorable. As was my trip to Albion for Fable 2, which had some flaws, but not enough to keep me from playing both of its subsequent downloaded expansion packs.

And then there was Left 4 Dead. From the makers of Half-Life 2 and Portal, this pure action game threw hordes of zombies at players, alone or online, with fantastic results. Of all the fleeting online expereinces I've had on XBox Live, the time spent with Left 4 Dead was the most memorable.

From the zombie apocalypse I headed to Africa for Farcry 2, another gorgeous first-person shooter, this one combined with the sandbox play of Grand Theft Auto 4. It's a formula that worked quite well and offered weeks and weeks of gunfights and exploration. Next, I was pulled aboard another alien spaceship for Prey, and after that it was off to a vast island nation for another sandbox masterpiece, Just Cause.

I spent some time in the shaky future of Fracture, and after that I returned to Africa for an all-new Resident Evil epic (the 5th one). What worlds were left to conquer at this point? Quite a few worlds, actually, as I took off for the stars in Mass Effect, a game where the whole galaxy is the friggin' sandbox. Size and scale are relative, it seems.

Most recently, I enjoyed some more lighthearted fare with Guitar Hero III : Legends of Rock and The Maw, and for more sandbox fun I headed for the city of Stilwater in Saint's Row. The crusades were the setting for the stunning and original Assassin's Creed, a game of strange designs yet memorable gameplay. Finally, I've wrapped up my first year of XBox 360 with the spooky first-person melee masterpiece Condemned : Criminal Origins.

Currently I've taken a dive into a deep and massive RPG with The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion, and started on the sequel to Condemned, called Condemned 2 : Bloodshot. Oh, and tomorrow night at midnight I'm hoping to score a copy of Ghostbusters at Wal-Mart, because bustin' makes me feel good.

Many worlds behind me, and many more beckon. The XBox 360 has been a gateway to some of the best game experiences of my life, and I can't wait to where it takes me next.

Beaten : Condemned : Criminal Origins

2009-06-04T14:17:00.000-07:00

Condemned : Criminal Origins was a very early XBox 360 release, which is why I got it for a very low price at Gamestop back in April. However, its age is no indication of its quality - Condemned is an excellent first-person gaming experience with a lot going for it, and one I'm glad I took the time to explore.

The game excells at many things. First and foremost, I can proudly say that, unlike any Resident Evil since the first, Condemned actually made me jump a few times. It has the music, it sets the mood, and it provides the environment for all-out creepiness. There are levels here not seen before in my gaming memory, such as an abandoned department store where some of the mannequins may be more mobile than you'd expect, and a derelict school with a demented lunch lady chasing around with a cleaver.

In addition to the creepiness factor, this game has some of the best first person melee combat I've ever seen. All sorts of things are used as melee weapons - from pipes to sledgehammers to flaming 2x4s, and the scarcity of guns and ammo in the game makes learning the melee combat a must. Hitting with the right trigger and carefully timed blocking with the left are the essentials. The block in particular is tough to get right, because it's a temporary block - you only hold the block for a second before it pulls back, so you have to time it so that your foes' shots connect with it.

All hope is not lost, though, as melee combat is made somewhat easier with the assistance of a taser that you get for much of the game. Using the left button activates the taser, which when properly aimed can stun an enemy, giving you a chance to land a hit, or even take away their weapon while they're stunned. You have to know when to use the taser, though, because it's got a long recharge time.

But wait, there's more. As a detective, you've got some cool crime scene tools to use, too, at certain points in the game. You get to scan walls and floors for stains and prints, collect samples and send them back to the lab, zero in on decaying bird coprses with a sort of smell detector, and take pictures with a digital camera.

The decaying birds, along with metal pieces, make up the game's two collection quests, and these items can be very cleverly hidden. Learning to look around carefully becomes a key skill, not just for getting these items, but just to find a way through a level.

Condemned has a great story that builds to an epic confrontation at the end, and that last level is quite difficult. I had played through every other level using only melee weapons, but had to pick up a machine gun during my penultimate battle of the game. There are some environmental glitches that can get a player stuck, but autosaves once again take some of the pain out of restarting once this happens.

I even encountered a glitch which gave me an achievement that I really didn't deserve, but I'm not about to feel guilty when they've had over two years to patch the damn game. There are also some primitive videogame anachronisms, like obstacles that really shouldn't be obstacles - a shin-high fence that I can't step over, for example.

All of this is forgivable, as Condemned : Criminal Origins joins an ever-growing list of XBox 360 classics that I'm just now catching up to - and yes, like Saint's Row, there is a sequel already out there, and already available at bargain price, so it may not be that long before I revisit the creepy world of Condemned.

The 2008 - 2009 TV Season Wrap-Up

2009-06-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I've blogged about television, so I thought it'd be a good time to take a look back at the 2008 - 2009 season and share a few thoughts. There were plenty of good shows once again, and sadly some of them didn't make the cut. Stupid network executives.

Reaper
Still the best show on TV, it was tragically cancelled last week when the CW announced its horrifically shallow fall line-up. Reaper, if you didn't know, told the story of the son of the Devil, sold out by his parents at birth, who is forced to hunt down escaped souls on Earth. Sharp writing and stellar cast chemistry made Reaper a unique and special treat every week. There's a slight hope that this show may survive in syndication, and if it does, I'll be watching it once again.

Life On Mars
First there was Journeyman, and at the same time, the BBC had on a show called Life On Mars, after the David Bowie song. It was about a modern-day police detective who, after being hit by a car, wakes up as a police detective in 1973. It was touted by some TV critic at the time as "a smarter Journeyman", although the two shows were very different.

So, ABC decided last fall to make an American version of Life On Mars, this time with New York police detectives, and scored Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli for the cast. This show kicked total ass. Each week was a detective story of its own, usually, and the overarching story of how the main character found himself back in 1973 was also there. Its ratings stunk, so the network cancelled it, but gave it the chance to finish out the season with an absolutely mind-blowing series finale. Life On Mars was, by far, the best new show of the year.

Battlestar Galactica
Battlestar Galactica wrapped up its final season in grand style this spring with an awesome, epic ending. Overall the shows pace picked up in the second half of its two-year-stretched-out final season, and all actually was revealed, I think. It finishes remembered as one of the best sci-fi shows to ever grace our television screens, and will hopefully inspire future makers of such shows to remember that while spaceships and explosions are indeed cool, its the characters that make it all a good story. Farewell, Battlestar Galactica, you will be missed. The spinoff movie (or possible miniseries), Caprica, airs this fall, I think.

Heroes
Heroes had grown very stagnant during the first half of its season, but the episodes that aired in the winter and spring showed some promise. The problems I have with the show are the endless "there's some terrible future that we have to stop" plotlines, and the fact that it's totally unrealistic, given the prevalence of cell phone cameras and other such devices in modern times, for someone, somewhere, to NOT have posted a YouTube movie of someone flying, or shooting lightning, or SOMETHING. Basically, after all this time, the whole damn world should know that there are super-powered people running around.

Heroes returns this fall, and while the characters are interesting enough to keep me watching, I'm hoping for some dramatic new stories or some new direction to make me glad I tune in.

Chuck
Chuck consistenly proved entertaining throughout the year, with the same elements that made its first season so much fun : a great cast, cool stories, and evolving characters. Guest stars at the end of the season included Chevy Chase and Scott Bakula, and it wrapped up with an ending that could make season three very interesting. This show barely got renewed for a half-season, starting next March, and with a smaller budget, so hopefully it will still be good.

Terminator : The Sarah Connor Chronicles
It's hard to feel too upset about the cancellation of this show. It wasn't all that bad, really. It had a second season that just got bogged down with too many characters and too slow of a plot. I fell asleep a lot when trying to watch it. But they were trying - too hard, I think - to make this a smart and complex show. The problem was that it's Terminator, and when you veer this far from the established continuity of the movies and then add a bunch of extra stuff, it's hard to really get into it.

The fourth movie, which I saw a few weeks back in the theater, is pretty good. Why they makers of both the TV show and the new flick didn't get together and use the show to build up for the movie is one of those things I'll never understand. I think they call it "synergy" or something.

24
Jack Bauer was back, this time kicking terrorist ass in Washington, D.C., and it was actually a really good season. Some of the old characters were back, and were good to see again, and the plot that unfolded genuinely kept me guessing until the last episode. They even - briefly - hinted at a larger plot that has been going on over the entire show's run, which kind of made sense. But it was a brief hint - will the writers remember it next year and expand on it, or let it go and just start a whole new thing?

They did fall back on some of their old story crutches that I had hoped I'd seen the last of. There was a - gasp - MOLE at the FBI office! Wow, never saw that one coming. And, once again, Jack's daughter is threatened by his enemies and used as leverage against him. At least THIS TIME she acquits herself well in that situation and kicks some ass of her own. Hopefully the writers will read this and not put those two things in the next season of 24.

The XTacles
This excellent and hilarious spin-off of Frisky Dingo only aired two episodes as a experiment, and after that it was cancelled, and so was Frisky Dingo. Both shows were just plain funny, and very original, and will be sorely missed.

All Those Cartoons
The Venture Brothers had a great third season last summer, and is slated to return in November of this year. As is the Boondocks.

The usual Fox Sunday night line-up was consistently funny - The Simpsons, King of the Hill, Family Guy, and American Dad all provided sporadically - scheduled laughs. Joining them late in the season was a new cartoon from the creators of Arrested Development called Sit Down Shut Up, and it was a pretty decent addition to the lineup.

King of the Hill, sadly, has enjoyed its 13th and final full season and has been (somewhat) cancelled, as far as I can tell. There are two to six new episodes to air, but when and where they will air has yet to be determined. In its slot this fall will be The Cleveland Show, a Family Guy spin-off, which I'm sure will be funny as hell.

South Park as well continued to be over-the-top and hilarious in its thirteenth season. And although it looks like Code Monkeys won't be returning for a third season, overall it's never been better for animated comedy on television.

And there we go. Tune in next year for another annual TV season wrap-up, and find out what you should have watched.

Beaten : Assassin's Creed

2009-05-30T18:33:00.000-07:00

My tour of old XBox 360 classics has brought me to Assassin's Creed, one of the more interesting and refreshingly unique games I've encountered during this generation. It's a graphically gorgeous adventure game with combat and stealth elements, as well as collection quests, and a bizarre, bookended storyline that's just plain goofy as all get out.

Let's start there, with the story. One might look at the box or the screenshots of Assassin's Creed and think that it's the adventure of a medieval-era assassin. A safe assumption, until you begin playing and find out that you're actually a hoodie-wearing slacker in the near future being held hostage by a gruff middle-aged scientist and a hot assistant chick.

See, you're the descendent of an assassin. Yeah. Apparently you're also a disgrace to the bloodline, because you don't even try to snap the scrawny scientist-guy's neck and escape, you just accept your imprisonment and do what they want you to do, which is lie back on a table that allows you to play the real game.

The real game is that of the assassin Altair, who is sent by his guild master to take out a bunch of supposedly bad guys who are all plotting some evil thing together. You ride to one of three stunningly realized ancient cities - Jerusalem, Damascus, or Acre - and do all sorts of side missions in order to learn what you need to know to make your assassination.

You can spend a lot of time just sneaking about, trying not to get noticed at all by the guards, who get really pissed if you do anything wrong, like running through the streets or climbing up the side of a building. When the stealth aspect of the game fails, you'll have to fight, and the combat in Assassin's Creed is another one of its innovative designs.

Simple button-mashing will end the game very quickly. No, this is the antithesis of button-mashing, as you must watch the combat very carefully and execute precisely timed counter-moves. It took me awhile to figure this out, but once I did I was fine for the rest of the game. The guards get increasingly complex moves as the game progresses, and will in many cases break your attempts to block thier blows, but still, that counter move was all I needed for the remainder of the experience.

It's very satisfying to pull these moves off, and once you're good you'll find yourself enjoying the flow of battle, and not being afraid of any number of guards you encounter. And you'll encounter them a lot, as the sheer size of the game's nine main missions means you'll be doing all sorts of things to piss them off.

Another cool aspect of the gameplay is climbing the towers in each area to get an overview. Some of the vistas seen from up there are breathtaking, and doing so adds icons to your map for that area. When you're done looking you can make a safe dive off your perch and into a pile of conveniently-placed hay. The climbing and jumping of this game are also revolutionary and spot-on. Instead of pressing a button to jump, Altair knows when you're running along a rooftop and you come to a ledge, that it's time to jump. If you're not running, he'll stop. A great design choice.

To gain information about your assassination target in each area, you'll interrogate, pickpocket, and eavesdrop on the townspeople, and you'll do jobs pawned off onto you by other members of the assassin's guild. Apparently Altair is the ONLY member of the guild who's not afraid to do an honest day's work. Every other assassin you meet is a lazy, cowardly piece of crap. On top of that, all the jobs they give you are cheap-ass time limit tasks - like, say, kill the three guys the lazy assassin was supposed to kill in three minutes, and he'll give you a tip about the guy you're supposed to kill. We're all in one big happy guild, huh? Right.

In addition to the frustrating time-limit missions, there are tedious flag-collecting missions everywhere, with no apparent reward, so I only did the first and easiest one of those. Repetitiveness premeates this game's design, as tasks like saving citizens from pushy guards, pickpocketing throwing knoves, and hell, everything else basically repeat nine times, forming the body of the gameplay.

All of these gameplay aspects are enjoyable enough, but for individual gamers I suspect that their mileage may vary, and some won't find the repetitiion enjoyable all through the ending. I did, though. Barely. The ending was cool, and not difficult at all, having mastered the previously mentioned counter moves.

At least the ending of Altair's story was cool. The ending of the hooded slacker descendent of Altair, cowering in the future, was however completely unsatisfying and thoroughly stupid. Only a sequel could alleviate some of the lingering questions of the unresolved future-story, and fortuantely, one's coming this fall.

A few minor complaints do come to mind. This skilled assassin and acrobat I'm playing can't swim? Seriously, a dive into a shallow river in town means death? What is this, 1993 all over again? And there was once a window ledge I found that, once I'd grabbed onto it, I couldn't let go nor climb up on it. I was literally left hanging and had to restart at my last save point. It wasn't too big of a deal, as the autosave system, unlike, say, the SWIMMING system, is modern. Loading screens are also a bit on the slow side.

In spite of the repetitive gameplay and some very odd design choices, Assassin's Creed works and is a visual and gameplay masterpiece. Enough of it is so refreshingly unique - the controls, the setting - as to offset any of the inherent tediousness of the tasks presented over and over. I am looking forward to the sequel, if only to answer the many lingering questions about the unfinished story that bookends the tale of Altair and his fellow assassins.

Beaten : Saints Row

2009-05-28T18:27:00.000-07:00

Last week I finished a three week long tour of duty in Saint's Row, an early XBox 360 release that yeah, I'm just getting around to playing. Yes, my blog has become, for the forseeable future, a site that reviews old XBox 360 games. Everything I write about a game like Saint's Row has probably been scribed by much more timely bloggers years hence.

Anyway, Saint's Row is another great sandbox game, like Just Cause and Grand Theft Auto IV. It seems as if I'm getting fixated on that genre. Saint's Row is really a lot like GTA IV, with some new aspects that make it far more than just a clone.

Sure it has vehicle theft, driving, shooting, violence, a huge city, missions, side missions, and lovable sociopaths as characters, just like GTA IV. But Saint's Row has a vibe and feel all its own. It's fun, colorful, and so over-the-top as to be a nearly satirical look at its competitors.

The game has a great gang mechanic, with players doing things to help establish their street gang as the major player in the town. There are three competing gangs, and missions act as a framework for the all-out turf war that wages between your gang and theirs. Neighborhoods are taken, and have to be defended, in a play mechanic similar to Just Cause's guerilla war.

The side activities range from the standards like street racing and car theft to innovative and hilarious ones like escorting hookers around with their clients, making sure to keep away from pesky news vans and paparazzi, and others like collecting insurance fraud money by falling in front of cars in traffic. These missions are all fun and get very challenging in later levels.

Another interesting design choice is that these missions - at least some of them - must be done to fill up the player's respect meter. Once the meter is full, the player may take on the next story mission. So there's really no bypassing the side content (although there's so much of it that players can skate through the game doing only the tasks they find easiest) and just running through the story mode.

The game has a challenging but not impossible vibe throughout its play. There are no mid-mission checkpoints, so failing a mission can mean restarting, driving to the mission, and facing some parts of it over and over. It's not too harsh, though, and the game is so much fun that it's worth the struggle.

Derivative in many ways, innovative in others, Saint's Row is just simply another enjoyable game world to explore. The music throughout the game is utterly fantastic, and the ending is epic - so good in fact that it's got me thinking about picking up the sequel, Saints Row 2, which came out last fall. Hmmm, maybe after the price drops a bit.

Beaten : The Maw

2009-05-25T07:16:00.000-07:00

The Maw is a cute little 3D action-puzzle game released a few months back for the XBox 360 via the Live service, and it's really a great, quick, and low-frustration diversion from the usual fare found on the system. I took a few days off from playing Saints Row to visit the world of The Maw and had a fun time.

Players play as a small alien guy who, like the Maw, has been captured for reasons unknown by faceless alien soldiers and thrown into a cage on a spaceship. The adventure begins with the ship crashing and the alien guy and Maw finding themselves together at the crash site. A believable bond of survival and friendship quickly forms between the duo as they begin to explore their surroundings. The alien guy drags the Maw around by a sort of energy leash, and the Maw starts to eat everything that moves, including cute little pink blob critters.

As the Maw eats, he has growth spurts, increasing in size throughout the game but remaining loyal enough to the alien guy to not eat him, too. In addition, certain creatures that the Maw eats grant him differing abilities, from breathing fire to stampeding over foes, and these new talents are required to navigate the game's environmental puzzles. Level after level unfolds this way until the climatic finish with the now-gigantic Maw.

It's a blast. There's exploration and discovery throughout the game, and no death. Saves are made after every level for convenience, and the levels can be revisited at any time once they are unlocked. I forget how many Microsoft Points this game cost, but it wasn't that much and it was totally worth it. There are three "deleted scenes" also available for the Maw (extra levels to download) that I will probably be checking out at some point as well.

Fable 2 : I've Seen The Future, and It's Still Dogged By Bugs

2009-05-12T07:36:00.000-07:00

I downloaded the Fable 2 : See The Future expansion pack this morning and played through the whole thing in a few hours. It's got more of the same kind of things in the same kind of places, with a few new elements, but unfortuantely nothing that addresses the game-dampening glitches that have dogged my experience.

Those readers who have not played Fable 2 or its two expansion packs yet, skip this article. It's going to be spoiler-heavy, a regrettable but necessary function to elaborate on the issues I have with the game. If you're just wanting to know if See The Future is any good on its own merits, I can safely say that yes, it is enjoyable and well worth the price if you've enjoyed everything about Fable 2 so far and want more.

Okay, on with the spoilers then. You've been warned.

At the end of Fable 2 the player has to make a choice of three possible conclusions, two of which (including the one I took) leave the player without the remarkable pet dog that has accompanied the hero through the game. At the time it was a hard sacrifice to make, and the storytelling impact weighed heavily on me, as I'm sure it did to other players.

The problem with all of this is that there can still be things to do in the world of Albion after completing the main game that require the dog. There is a Demon Door in Rookridge, for example, that can only be opened with dog tricks. The designers clearly thought of this, though, and when players go to that area, they encounter the ghost of their dog, who can indeed do the tricks required to open the door.

Inside the door is a ghostly realm called Memory Lane, and from that point on the ghost dog resides there. If you get a book with more dog training or tricks, you can go there and teach him, but the ghost dog can never leave. So, if there are still dig spots out there (buried treasures that can only be discovered with the dog), or if the player hasn't completed the Archaeologist Quest, then they are out of luck.

To me, this was at the time an acceptable loss as a consequence of the choice I had made at the end of the game. However, when the first package of downloadable content was released in January, things changed. In my short review of that expansion, I mentioned one cool thing that I didn't reveal, and that feature in particluar was, for me, certainly worth the price of the deal. On Knothole Island, you could resurrect your dog. I was once again able to explore and dig with my faithful companion.

However, shortly after writing that review and then setting out with my dog to explore the world anew, I made the mistake of taking him to Memory Lane. At which point he returned to ghostly form and could not leave the area. Returning to the doggie resurrection thingy, I found it no longer functional - it was a one-time use item, it seemed.

So my dog was dead a second time. I forgot about Fable 2, disgusted by such a terrible glitch. I searched the internet to see if this had happened to anyone else, and only found one other person who stated that the same thing had happened to his dog, but no one seemed to have any solutions.

And this new package of content didn't fix it either. Some of the new items available are breed-changing potions, so I took the bloodhound one to Memory Lane and turned my ghost dog into a ghost bloodhound, hoping that maybe it would snap him out of ghost form, to no avail.

See The Future was short-lived fun, and more of the same, but I'd sincerely like to see Lionhead Studios spend the next few months working on bug fixes rather than more content. I've still got a glitched home that I can't sell or rent, too, so all I see of the future are unfixed bugs and content I can't fully explore with a forever-danmed ghost dog.

And no, I don't like the game enough to start over and lose my castle and four million in gold, thanks very much.

Dead Space : Downfall DVD

2009-05-12T07:15:00.000-07:00

I picked up Dead Space : Downfall, an animated prequel to last year's survival horror masterpiece, during the Circuit City closing a few months back. I recently watched it again and found it to be really quite good.

Perhaps I'm starting to jones for more Dead Space, and with the next game slated to be a Wii title this fall, and a rail shooter at that, it might be awhile before I get to really stomp around like I did last year. So, this movie is all I have.

As stated, it's a prequel that picks up the story at the point where the marker is found on the planet's surface that will eventually drive everyone nuts and turn them into those life-of-the-party necromorphs. It's soon after that when the Ishimura arrives to crack the planet - which is a cool sequence that we get to see - and the action begins.

The main story revolves around the Ishimura's security chief, a standard sci-fi tough chick, who leads her team against the transformed members of the crew. In futility of course, since anyone who has played the game knows how it ends for them all.

Still, it's a good ride - action packed and gory. We see some familiar locales like the bridge and the mess hall, and some familiar enemies, who they soon figure out need to be shot in the limbs to slow them down. There are also references to the lore of Dead Space, such as the Unitologist movement and their designs on the marker, but noting revelatory beyond what was told in the game. It all ends with one final heroic act, just as the rescue ship from the game arrives, signalling the start of the game.

Dead Space : Downfall isn't oscar-worthy, but for fans of the game it's a recommended dose of more Dead Space that can hopefully sustain them until we see more, and hopefully learn more, about this fascinating and well-crafted universe.

Star Trek : Initial Impressions

2009-05-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

It's a busy week for me, with the approach of Mother's Day and all that, but tonight at 9:30 it hit me. There was a new Star Trek movie in theaters this evening, and I was about to just let it slide until after the weekend.

Um, no way. I had to see it, exhaustion be damned.

And I'm glad I did. This re-invention of the classic characters, cleanly explained through the plot, really knocks it out of the park. It's two hours of good storytelling, fast paced and at times funny.

There is one deep part of the plot's very foundation that seemed to be shaky, but it is only touched on for a moment, so I will withhold any comment on it until I see it again and listen more carefully to what I thought was said there.

Other than that, I walked away from the theater at 2:30 AM with the glorious feeling that Star Trek is back, and the future is looking good again.

The Coolest T-Shirt Ever

2009-05-04T14:19:00.000-07:00

And here it is...

Don't get it? It's from the movie Tron. One of my personal favorites, although almost everyone else hated it. The main character, Kevin Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges), owns an arcade and wears this shirt around.

It seems silly when I explain it like that. But to me, it's cool.

Beaten : Mass Effect, a.k.a. the Moon Patrol RPG

2009-05-04T07:30:00.000-07:00

I spent most of April playing the Platinum Hits version of Mass Effect, which I don't normally go for, except that the twenty dollar package includes a bonus disc with the extra mission "Bring Down The Sky", as well as game trailers and developer commentary. It's quite a value for such an incredible game experience.

Mass Effect is an action-RPG offering complex character development, richly crafted lore, and original alien designs that put the species found in both Star Wars and Star Trek to shame. As expected with an RPG, the player will spend a lot of time in menus and sub-menus, adjusting stats and upgrading weapons and armor. Fortunately, the design of these menus is fairly flawless and intuitive.

And that's good. The player controls a party of three at a time, with the main human character plus two members chosen from an eventual pool of six. There's a lot to juggle, as alien members of your crew require alien-specific armors and, based on their skill sets, will have different abilities that need developed. All of this item and character development work soon becomes second nature and doesn't really slow down the action overmuch.

A great feature added to the game to make item choices easier is the "Compare" button, which allows players to compare a new item's stats with the ones already equiped. This can be done with items just picked up as well as items in stores, even before the player purchases them.

The story starts out with a tutorial level that's a full part of the story, with the player thrown right into the action. The player encounters moments along the way where moral choices must be made through speech selctions. It's a basic good/evil character development tool, with consequences along the way that can have an impact on the story, but for the most part the choices felt like "be cool" versus "be a dick" to everyone.

Completing the tutorial lands the player on a gigantic space station that is the central hub of the game, with hours of exploration, lore to discover, and side quests to complete. Experience can be gained from learning lore and even opening crates, not just through combat, so I found the payoff for the tediousness of this part of the game worthwhile in the long run.

Finally, after all of that, the player is given a starship and turned loose on the Milky Way. That's when the game really opens up, and the previously linear pace of Mass Effect becomes a galactic sandbox. While there are three main story missions present at this point, there are also around fifteen star clusters to explore, each with up to five star systems, and each of those with not just planets, but some moons, asteroids, and other spaceships to check out.

It can be a bit overwhelming at first, but keep in mind that generally, there's only one planet in each star system that the player can land on. Some planets can be surveyed from orbit, which can yield minerals and other items that are presented in various collection quests. So in reality there are a lot less places to visit than at first glance at that galaxy map on the ship's bridge.

The ship itself doesn't land on the planet, rather it flies low and drops off the player and his two chosen companions in the Mako, a six-wheeled all-terrain vehicle that is a major part of the gameplay. The Mako is armed and can take damage, and OFTEN requires time-consuming repairs while out exploring. Using the buggy for battle against gun turrets or the giant, wormlike Thresher Maw critters found here and there can be challenging. I found hit-and-run tactics good for these encounters.

In addition to the guns on the Mako, it also sports some rockets on the bottom that can give it a quick boost into the air. This feature baffled me at first. Was its intended use to jump chasms? No. Was it meant for getting the vehicle unstuck in some of those rugged mountain areas? It worked for that, but did not seem essential.

No, it wasn't until I got the mission to Luna (Earth's moon) later in the game that the rocket-boost feature on the Mako made sense. It was a feature added to the buggy as a tribute to the arcade classic Moon Patrol. Driving around on the moon in that buggy, jumping with the boost for no apparent reason, made me think of Mass Effect as a modern day Moon Patrol RPG. Just sayin'.

When the player lands on a planet, there isn't a whole planet to explore, either. Rather, it's a large square patch of a planet in most cases - the exceptions are those main story missions, which can offer different, more directed areas to visit. The planets with the square patch offer lots of exploration. On the map there can be different things indicated - debris, settlements and bases, and the like - but only through thorough exploration of the bug square patch will the player find hidden mineral deposits and other surprises.

It does get tedious doing this on planet after planet, but the rewards are worth it. If the player is not into this sort of playstyle, however, the option exists to simply go to the main story mission worlds and rush through the game. The cost is not only missing out on hidden outposts and titanium deposits - all of the discoveries made during these expeditions equal experience, and in my through playthrough I was able to reach level fifty by doing this.

Experience does not come easy at first in this game. There's nowhere to "farm" it, and I found my party ill-equipped to face a hidden mercenary group I stumbled across on some remote world early on. After getting experience (as well as better guns and armor) from doing one of the main story missions, though, I was able to go back and get revenge.

Some things found on alien worlds will require someone in the party to have a high electronics or decryption skill, and fortunately any experience gained by party members on the ground is shared with those stuck on the ship. The opening of decrypted crates, the recovery of electronic items, and the surveying of mineral deposits all use a quicktime event where the four controller buttons are displayed. The player must hit the lit-up button on the screen fast enough to succeed in the sequence. Most of the ones I did on the first try, so the timer on these events may be more forgiving than found in other games.

If the player wants to skip the quicktime stuff, they can spend omni-gel on it. Omni-gel is acquired through normal gameplay, and every item acquired can be converted into it. So, instead of selling off all of the extra guns the party acquires, it might be a good idea to use some to make omni-gel. It also is what is used to repair the Mako, and to be honest that's where most of mine went.

Technically, the game is gorgeous, although indoor environments repeat throughout the game, and many of the planets one lands on look the same. I encountered a few glitches in my 42 hours of play. There was some lag on loading, one instance of a system lockup, some indoor snow on one icy world, and one frustrating expereince where I exited the Mako and was stuck in the terrain. Nothing too game-breaking though.

The characters and story are just fantastic - epic in fact, and as good as any sci-fi movie or television show to come around in recent memory. The four weapon types - assault rifle, shotgun, pistol, and sniper rifle are made more interesting by varied ammo types that have different effects. There's a whole range of "biotic" powers, too, but I did not explore their use in my playthrough.

The bonus mission, "Bring Down The Sky" is just one world - an asteroid actually, and can be done at any time once the player has the spaceship. It's a worthy addition and highlights one of the alien species not seen in the normal storyline. The bonus disc also has a feature about the future of Mass Effect, which seemed to indicate not only a sequel that's due out this fall, but more downloadable content for the first game. In addition, players of the first game have been put on notice to keep their saves - they will play a part in the starting of the second game, it seems. Awesome!

And I look forward to it all. Mass Effect is one of the finest games I've played this generation - a highly enjoyable RPG with lots of action that takes place in a masterfully crafted galaxy rich in history and lore. For the three weeks it took me to play it through, I couldn't put it down. There's so much more story to be told in that galaxy, and I can't wait to see what happens next.

Birthday Games Flood

2009-04-27T19:43:00.000-07:00

So, my 43rd birthday was last week - yes I'm inching closer to renaming this blog "Elderly Gamer", thanks very much - and I acquired quite a few games to add to my already huge backlog of unfinished / unplayed titles. I haven't had time to try them all out yet, but I'd like to log a few initial impressions, and later, if they warrant it, I'll write more about each one.

Guitar Hero 3 - Legends of Rock (XBox 360)
I've tried this game before, while visiting friends, and while I enjoyed it, I wasn't sure if it held enough appeal for me to spend the seventy dollars to buy it for myself. Enter the Circuit City liquidation sale back in February, where my wife Monique and I saw this game at half price. I told her I wanted it for my upcoming birthday, and she went back and bought it, hiding it from me the whole time.

I suck at this game. It requires the use of my left hand's middle, ring, and pinky fingers, which normally are dormant during game sessions. Plus, it's a rhythm game and I have no rhythm. Nonetheless, I have finished a career on Easy mode and am having a great time. It's a lot of fun and I now understand the appeal of these games. When you get it, get into a good streak of unbroken playing, it really feels like you're rocking out. All the bells and whistles attached to it - songs to unlock, things to purchase, boss battles - make it a much deeper experience than I'd anticipated.

Mirror's Edge (XBox 360)
My brother-in-law and his wife got me a $20 gift card from Target, and there I found Mirror's Edge for the XBox 360, marked for clearance at that exact amount. It's hard to believe this game came out last fall for three times that much and has dropped this far in price.

I played the demo last fall and, like Fracture, I decided to wait for a price drop. I didn't think it'd be this soon, because this is really an excellent and original game. It's a first-person platforming game with some mild combat elements thrown in. Players run across rooftops and through buildings, often with the police in pursuit. It's stylish, challenging, and fast-paced. But it's a game of trial and error, and I go splat A LOT.

Grand Theft Auto : Chinatown Wars (Nintendo DS)
My mother-in-law got me a Gamestop gift card, which I used to get this amazing DS title. Like the earliest GTA games, it offers a top-down view, but this time at an angle that allows the city to scroll by in a gorgeously rendered 3D display, with remarkable detail.

Rockstar has once again crafted an amazing rendition of Liberty City - nearly the same one as in GTA IV, minus the western third part of the map (Alderny). I've only done a few missions, but the formula of the GTA series - fun gameplay with strangely compelling psychotic characters - works well. Throw in some DS touch screen features like using the stylus to hotwire cars and play scratch-off lottery tickets - and you've got an awesome, fully loaded GTA game that's portable. More on this one later.

The Elder Scrolls IV : Oblivion (XBox 360)
My sister-in-law and her family sent me an e-gift card for Target, which I turned into this game. I had heard whispers, rumors, and rumblings among the dozen or so people worldwide who love the King's Field games that this expansive and gorgeous RPG has the same first-person gameplay and appeal.

They were right - this is a modern King's Field, and I couldn't be happier. I completed the tutorial mission and have been turned loose on what I can only assume is an enormous world of swords and sorcery. I can't wait to sink my teeth into this one when the time comes.

Assassin's Creed (XBox 360)
The weekend after my birthday brought a sale at Gamestop - buy two used games and get the third one for free - and this was the first title I picked. It's a strange story of an assassin (duh!) in the Holy Land during the crusades, sneaking around gorgeously rendered ancient cities like Damascus and Jerusalem.

Assassination is just part of it - there's clunky combat against gangs of hostile guards, collection quests out the wazoo, awesome platforming aspects, and side missions. I'm not sure how much I like it yet - I've done an assassination assignment in Damascus, and moved on to Jerusalem for another, and already the gameplay is feeling repetitive. The stealth aspects of sneaking around are also getting on my nerves. Maybe this title just needs some more time to grow on me.

Saint's Row (XBox 360)
The second game I got at Gamestop's sale was this early, pre-GTA IV sandbox title, which offers many similar elements, but also throws in territory acquisition, a la Just Cause. In this case, it's gangs fighting over turf, and so far it's a lot of fun.

It has occurred to me that I may be a sucker for these sandbox games. Time will tell if I can get into this one as much as I did GTA IV and Just Cause.

Condmened : Criminal Origins (XBox 360)
The free game I choose at Gaemstop was this one. Condemned is some sort of detective-horror game that came highly recommended by a few co-workers, but I haven't tried it out yet.

All in all, not a bad birthday! Seven games that should keep me busy until at least June - except Oblivion, which will probably keep me busy until the end of the year.

Milestones : Crush, Crumble, and Chomp

2009-04-15T15:02:00.000-07:00

Back in the early 1980s, or the Golden Age of Videogaming as I call it, everyone in the gang had a console. Most of them had the Atari 2600, and I was saddled with my poorly supported Odyssey 2. It was clear early on, though, from the articles that we were reading in Electronic Games magazine, that some of the best videogames of the time were coming out only on personal computers.

These games had more sophisticated graphics and gameplay, and often had new concepts. But none of us had parents that either could afford nor actually want a computer. The Apple 2 was selling for over a thousand dollars, the Atari 800 not far below that, the Atari 400 was around $500, and the Commodore computers came in not far below that.

But we talked about how we'd like to play some of those games. Once, in a conversation we had about how some of the games were loaded from cassette drives, my good friend Andy dismissed the loading time as no big deal - he said if he had a computer with a cassette drive, he'd come home from school, start loading the game, go make a sandwich, and return in time to play.

That scenario resonated with me for some reason, and after my parents finally got me a Commodore VIC 20 computer in the summer of 1983, I got to live it out.

I found a copy of Epyx's Crush, Crumble, and Chomp in a messy, disorganized glass cabinet at a department store called Swallen's in Mansfield, Ohio. There was only one copy, it was slightly buried under other titles in the mess, but it was the game I wanted. I had done my research on the game by reading a review of it in Electronic Games magazine and it sounded like just the sophistication I was looking for.

I had to also buy the 16K RAM expander cartridge to play this game on my VIC 20. It was the only game I ever had that required it, but the additional memory was useful for other applications. Still, I was plopping down quite a bit of my less-than-minimum wage paycheck on the deal. It was worth it.

Crush, Crumble, and Chomp was the predecessor to the much more polished Movie Monster Game Epyx released in the later part of the 1980s. Players choose from six standard movie monsters archetypes, plop them into one of four famous cities, and select from five different objectives, making the game more replayable and varied than anything else I had at the time.

The aforementioned sandwich-making loading time meant that each game session had to be taken more seriously. The turn-based action had to be meticulously handled to maximize the time before being overwhelmed by the military response of the puny humans who got strangely offended when you came into town.

This game was for me exactly what I needed to really open my mind to computer gaming. By 1983, the home console scene had grown somewhat stagnant, with games that were mostly variants of arcade games, and very few titles like Adventure coming out. Computers were clearly the way to go.

Crush, Crumble, and Chomp was also beautifully packaged in a sturdy box. Inside was a plastic tray to hold the cassette, six monster cards with bios of the beasts, and a thick, glossy, instruction manual.

With this game my path was set for the rest of the decade - I would be playing deeper, more challenging, and more unique games, all on Commodore computers. But on its own merits, Crush, Crumble, and Chomp was very, very fun. And yes, I could finish an entire ham and cheese sandwich in the time it took to load.

It's Hard To Find Fault With Fracture

2009-04-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

I first played Fracture for the XBox 360 last fall, when its free demo came out on XBox Live, and I thought it was pretty cool. However, with Dead Space, Fable 2, and Left 4 Dead just around the corner, I decided that it wasn't worth the sixty dollar price tag.

And I was right - those other three games are better. But Fracture is still a really good game, as I discovered after picking it up two months ago for a third of its release price ($20) in a Wal-Mart bargain bin. I've been playing it on and off ever since, progressing to what I think is two-thirds the way through the game, and it's been a great ride so far.

Fracture is a third person, over the shoulder shooter, easily comparable to Gears of War and the like. The hero is your typical tough guy future space marine dude, with the silly name of Jet Brody. The U.S. in this climate-changed future is - get this - Fractured into two factions, one that's into cybernetic enhancements and the other one into genetic modifications.

The hook of Fracture is a good one - players have terrain-altering abilities built into their guns or maybe their armor - oh hell, it's on the left and right bumper buttons of the controller. They can raise and lower terrain, creating mountains or pits right in front of them, with what they call "the entrencher".

The applications of these abilities and the whole "fracture" theme are well-woven into the game. In combat, players can raise the ground in front of them for cover, or lower it to dig a foxhole, or raise the ground the enemy is on to disorient them for a few seconds. It works well, looks cool, and never gets old.

There are terrain puzzles, too, to solve with the entrencher and the terrain-altering grenades, one of which is particularly useful in that it creates tall spires that rise straight up. Raise some ground to fix a broken bridge before crossing it. Or use the entrencher to dig under a closed door.

The weapons are for the most part pretty standard (versions of the assault rifle, shotgun, sniper rifle, and rocket launcher), but still cool, and there are some new ideas here as well. The "Black Widow" is a good example - you shoot up to six charges out towards a group of enemies, and then detonate all of them at once. The vortex grenade is also fun - it creates a powerful magnetic vortex where you throw it, pulling in enemies, crates, rocks, and the like. It's always funny to watch it go off.

Combat is gritty and nearly constant, with few quiet moments, as the player slogs from area to area. Enemies get tougher and bosses show up later, but there are enough checkpoints and saves to keep it from getting too frustrating. The music playing during battle is really good, and adds to the tension. Big points for the epic soundtrack.

There's a vehicle section, too, with the strangest all-terrain vehicle I've yet seen in a game. The gun on it is automatic, leaving the player to drive it around, which is quite a challenge in itself as the controls are a bit off-putting. The left stick is used to give it the gas or hold back, and the right stick steers. It felt very awkward, but it was a short sequence and had more terrain-altering fun as the player used the vehicle's abilities to make ramps or dig under doors while driving around.

Look, if you're a rock-hard sell on this generation of gaming, with the standards set very high by Gears of War, Call of Duty 4, and GTA IV, you might find fault with Fracture. This middle-aged gamer stands on softer ground and has found it to be a solid, polished, gem of a game, certainly worthy of the twenty dollars I spent and enjoyable as a title to pick up and take a crack at from time to time.

Did I get enough bad puns into that last paragraph? Hmmm...maybe I should just split while I'm ahead.

Beaten : GTA IV : The Lost and Damned

2009-04-03T15:49:00.000-07:00

The feeling of "Whoa, you get a lot of content for a download" quickly fades to "Awww, that's it?" when you ride into the sunset of Grand Theft Auto IV : The Lost and Damned, which is a testament to how much fun it all is. It isn't that short - and there's still lots of content I've yet to finish, just as there still is with the main game - but the climactic last few story missions are epic enough to leave the gamer hungry for more.

I don't have much to add that I didn't cover in my previous post about the game. I'll just reiterate that this is the way to do downloadable expansions. There's another chapter coming this fall, according to the game's makers, but if there were one a month I'd buy and play them all.

The story wraps up well, and once again the exemplary writing skills of the staff at Rockstar make the player somehow care for and empathize with a bunch of sociopaths on a rampage. The characters are quirky, funny, and real in many ways, even as they are shooting rocket launchers and riding through the streets of Liberty City.

In short, this was a purchase well worth the price. I'll be going back again soon, I know, to tie up any loose ends - even the trivial ones - because this game world and these characters are timelessly fun to play with.

Beaten : Deadly Creatures

2009-03-22T08:04:00.000-07:00

Two things I like but are rare in the videogame world - refreshingly new ideas, and hardcore games on the Wii - came together last month with the release of Deadly Creatures, a great little action - adventure game where the player guides both a tarantula and a scorpion through one of the most unique gaming experiences seen in this generation.

Arachnophobes stay away, as the realistic, creepy - crawly presentation was enough to make my wife say "Eeeeew!" when she would walk into the living room and catch me playing the game. The creatures (except for the two human characters, voiced by Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper) and environments are lifelike, not cartoony, and the tension is hightened by superbly moody music.

The nunchuck is used to move and everything else is used to fight. This is a combat and exploration game, and there are a ton of moves and abilities to unlock as the player progresses through the it's ten levels. The controls work generally well, but some of the more sophisticed moves are hard to pull off with any consistency. I seemed to revert to more basic moves in the heat of battle and did just fine, and if I pulled off a complex combo move, more the better.

One move that vexed me at first was one for the scorpion where the player twists the Wii remote 180 degrees and the scorpion is supposed to burrow into the ground, and then burst out at enemies above. It took some trial and error to figure out that you had to twist it slow, lest it count as a sideways movement and thus result in a tail swipe.

Fortunately, the moves that players unlock are easily reviewed from the pause menu, so they can stop and look them up at their leisure. There are moves unique to each of the deadly creatures you contol, with the tarantula having some web-spinning and stealth attack skills and the scorpion being more of a tough-guy "tank", usually getting the best head-on attacks and killer combos.

There are finishing moves, too, presented with those old favorites of mine, quicktime events. Press C or Press A or move the Wii remote and nunchuck downwards all of a sudden, in response to onscreen prompts, to get great cinematic finishes on some of your foes. Those crunching sounds can be very satisfying after a long battle.

The foes are great, too - ranging from other spiders and scorpions to beetles, wasps, small lizards, mantises, and rats. Bosses include a gila monster, rattlesnake, and a redneck. There's enough variety in the foes and their attacks to keep it fresh, and they are often quite challenging.

The player has no control over which of the deadly creatures they are playing, which might seen like a bad design decision to some, but makes perfect sense when the big picture is looked at. The story of Deadly Creatures is a concurrent one of a tarantula and a scorpion, both taking mostly different paths to the same conclusion. Their paths cross sometimes, but usually only briefly.

So play alternates between the two for each level played and the story unfolds, very deftly and cleverly crafted. This leads to some backtracking through the same areas a few times in the begining of the game, which may lead some players feeling a degree of tedium, seeing those areas over and over again. Trust me on this - it's totally worth playing through those first six or seven levels to see the last three.

In addition, the design of the levels is very good, with some gravity-twisting, dizzying viewpoints reached in some areas thanks to the ability to climb up walls and ceilings. There were several "which way is up" points that reminded me once again of Super Mario Galaxy, and more recently Prey.

Saves are frequent enough to avoid frustration, and health (gained through eating grubs and crickets) is fairly easy to regenerate. There are collection quests (find all the grubs and green crickets) that are tallied up for each level, hidden areas where these things are stashed, and concept art galleries to unlock. Other bonus features include behind the scenes interviews with Billy Bob Thornton and Dennis Hopper.

Bravo to the folks at Rainbow Studios for creating such a unique and moody game, and kudos to the suits at THQ for taking a chance and publishing it. With this title and ones like Madworld, it seems like the long drought of great Wii games is over, and hopefully these games will do well enough to encourage more innovative and/or hardocre releases for the system.

Twenty Years Ago, A Shift In My Gaming

2009-03-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

An important personal gaming anniversary passed almost unnoticed nearly two weeks ago. It was on March 9, 1989, somehow twenty years back, that I made a major gaming shift and purchased a Nintendo Entertainment System. After six years of gaming exclusively on personal computers, I shifted my gaming focus to consoles once again.

Since the summer of 1983, at the height of the Great Videogame Crash (where the Atari - Intellivision - Odyssey - Colecovision console market crashed ), I'd been gaming on Commodore computers. First with the low-powered but great-for-gaming Vic 20, and then with what I consider one of the greatest gaming machines of all time, the Commodore 64.

Although the Nintendo Entertainment System was released in 1985, it took some time to catch on. I had noticed it at Toys-R-Us early on, but dismissed it as a kids' game playing machine when I saw it packaged with that silly-ass robot peripheral. There was a little snobbishness on my part there, I admit. The games coming out for the C64 at that time were state-of-the-art sophisticated, including stuff like Bard's Tale, Skyfox, and Ultima games, so playing one where a toy robot stacks plastic cylinders seemed a bit lowbrow.

I first took notice when a roommate's friend brought one over to our apartment. I wasn't there when it was hooked up, but I looked at some of the games he had sitting there, and again dismissed it. I mean, Goonies II? Hmmmph.

Later, there was a drunk night at another friend's house, where I crashed in his basement rather than drive home. He had shown me a little game called Castlevania, and for the first time, I was impressed. My friend passed out and I stayed awake all night playing that awesome, moody action title.

Most of that era was about adventure games for me, and I had a subscription to a newsletter called Questbusters, which had news, tips, and even walkthroughs for many adventure games out at the time. One article mentioned a game called The Legend of Zelda, and after reading about that game, my course was set.

Money was tight at the time, and the girlfriend I was living with was not very tolerant of my game habits, so it took a tax refund in early 1989 to give me the ability to get my hands on an NES. There was one more obstacle, though, and that was the same one that has been a thorn in the side of many consumers seeking Nintendo's current console, the Wii. NES consoles were flying off the shelves and very hard to find.

I called around town and searched far and wide before finally finding one in, of all places, a local Anderson's General Store. And although Zelda was an immediate purchase, I was also enthralled by the pack-in game, Super Mario Bros.

Buying my first console since my Odyssey 2 didn't put an immediate end to gaming on the Commodore 64, as I picked up many great games and many used/bargain games for years after that. For the next nine years, however, most of my gaming was spread out across that NES and seven more consoles, as well as three handheld systems. In 1998, when I got my modern PC and Ultima Online, things shifted back again.

Currently, with my PC aging and PC gaming mostly relegated to crappy MMOs, consoles are once again my gaming platforms of choice. Will it shift back again? Beats me. Twenty years ago the NES changed everything - what games I was playing and how I played them. My philosophy has always been to go where the games I want to play are, so I really don't have the slightest idea where my focus will be in twenty more years.

Beaten : Resident Evil 5

2009-03-18T16:55:00.000-07:00

The old phrase about a book being so good you can't put it down certainly applies to Resident Evil 5, Capcom's latest entry into the legendary game series. A brand new Resident Evil game (not counting remakes, spin-offs, and rail/light gun shooters mind you) is a once-in-a-generation videogame event, and this generations's Resident Evil continues the high standard set by its predecessors.

The gameplay is the same as Resident Evil 4 (Gamecube, PS2, and later Wii), with the over-the-shoulder view of the zombified mayhem coming at the player. What's new is the pairing of returning character Chris Redfield with a new partner, Sheva Alomar, who is the new hotness (sorry, Lara Croft), and is with you throughout the game. She's also a playable character that you unlock after beating the game, and available in both local and online co-op modes, which I've yet to try.

Sheva backs you up, and you control the inventory of both characters. When low on health, she'll come to your rescue, and she'll help with the item gathering (ammo, gold, etc, found in crates and such). Sometimes she'll need rescued, too, and there are lots of puzzles (mostly doors) that require both of you to activate in some fashion. Her AI is pretty good, although certainly not perfect, but not blatantly stupid either.

Resident Evil 5 lags behind the current console generations's big hits in some gameplay areas, like the whole move-and-shoot thing. Yes, you still have to stop to shoot, and if you need to turn around, you do it slowly. They've added a cover mechanism, too, where your player will pin against a wall for protection, but there's no moving left and right once you're doing it. You have to exit cover, move along the wall to the left or right, and re-establish cover.

A funny thing happened to me on the way to cover while playing this game. I had just picked up a rotten egg left behind by a fallen foe, and the option presented itself to eat the egg (press X) or give it to Sheva (press B). I was close to a wall at the time and wanted cover, but instead I ate the egg, and puked. You'd think a modern game would know to prioritize seeking cover in a firefight over eating a rotten egg.

The inventory is kind of clunky, too, but at least four items can be quick-selected using the D-pad. Getting to the other things in your inventory in the heat of battle can be an intractable mess, though, so you'll have to learn to do this cautiously at best, desperately at worst. Saving is done automatically at certain checkpoints, and was never an inconvenience, although I miss the typewriters found in previous games.

The thing is that Resident Evil 5 is so good, and rides in on such a long history of gamer good will and nostalgia, that these gameplay anachronisms can be easily forgiven. The graphics are certainly state-of-the-art, the weapons (and the system of weapon uprgading) are a joy, and the story is decent, too.

The cinematics are so enjoyable that I was contantly unprepared for the "quicktime" events, where players suddenly have to press X to dodge and the like, but didn't mind. I normally loathe games with quicktime events, but this game gets them right and again, it's all good.

Beating the game was quite a challenge for this middle-aged gamer, but I'm betting that those young whippersnappers who comprise the majority of the gaming public might find it to be a short game. I started playing on Friday morning, played a little more Saturday morning, played a lot on Sunday and Monday, and finally finished it off on Tuesday morning before work, just in time to head off some serious pauking from the usual suspect.

It was a helluva ride, though, and a very satisfying conclusion that was years in the making. Beating the game unlocks all sorts of stuff, including Mercenaries mode. There are all sorts of things to spend your accumulated points on, like alternate costumes, figurines, and making your weapons have infinite ammo. There's a great library that's also unlocked with huge entries detailing the history of the game world and its characters.

Resident Evil 5 is just plain fun for players who are willing to overlook some design anachronisms and clunkiness, and offers lots of replay value, too, making the total package well worth the price.

The Phoenix Wright Manga

2009-03-16T06:04:00.000-07:00

Desperate during this long, dark era where no new Ace Attorney games are on the release schedule, I picked up Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney Official Casebook Volume 1 : The Phoenix Wright Files Manga. A manga is a Japanese comic book, shrunk in size to that of a regular large paperback book, and read from back to front.

That was the first hurdle for me - figuring out how to read it. You start at the back page and read the panels right to left, top to bottom. Once I figured that out I began pouring through the black and white casebook, hoping to enjoy the complex court intrigue and deep character development the games were known for.

Not so much.

This is a collection of about a dozen short stories, featuring Phoenix Wright and many of the characters from the games in different situations. The stories are mostly lighthearted fare, with the defense lawyer dealing with situations like a stray kitten and a cold. It's not mystery nor crime drama in any sense.

Getting used to the Japanese way of cartooning (and how it's translated into English) has been an interesting process. The art style can change from nomral in one panel to exaggerated features in the next. When a character has an emotional outburst, for example, they often revert to a child-like appearance and it's suddenly Jim Henson's Phoenix Wright Babies.

Thought balloons often appear without an actual balloon, sometimes to show a character's contrasting thoughts on a matter. And to keep the art styles intact through the translation, sound effects are left in Japanese but little English translations are written near them and close attention must be paid.

All in all, this book was less sophisticated than I'd hoped it would be, but since I'm such a fan of the series, I've enjoyed it nonetheless for light reading. A new game in the series is in the works in Japan, so it's still going to be a long wait before we see it on these shores.

Grand Theft Auto IV : The Lost and Damned - That's The Way You Do It

2009-03-15T17:23:00.000-07:00

It's been almost a month since I downloaded Grand Theft Auto IV : The Lost and Damned, a twenty-dollar XBox 360 exclusive package that takes the incredible playground of Liberty City and refreshes it with a new character's story and great new gameplay elements. In many ways, it's just more of the same, but when the same is GTA IV, that's a really good thing.

What I like most about these sandbox games is the huge amount of content, and The Lost and Damned dumps more content into an already overflowing package. Players take on the role of Johnny Klebitz, second-in-command of the Lost biker gang, and play through a story mode that deftly weaves concurrently with that of Nico Bellic, the main game's star.

Nico and some of the characters from his tale make cameos here and there, but the Lost and Damned rolls out another great batch of new characters, once again skillfully crafted to make the player actually like and feel for the morally bankrupt psychos. It's wonderful and astonishing that such writing skills go into games these days.

The biker aspect is greatly featured, with some new twists added that make riding motorcycles in a sort-of formation fun. While following the gang's leader, a mechanism is present that rewards staying in formation by boosting health, giving players a chance to get fully healed up en route to the next shootout. Later, as the gang's leader, camera options show the player the whole pack if they so choose to view it.

An improvement of note is a more reasonable checkpoint system that prevents multiple rides to missions in many cases. It's a time-saving, frustration-preventing design choice that makes the gameplay flow more freely.

What makes all of the Lost and Damned such a complete package, though, is that every other aspect of Grand Theft Auto IV gets additions. There are new TV shows (including another hilarious episode of Republican Space Rangers), new internet stuff, and of course lots of great hard rock classics added to the radio that perfectly fit the motorcycle theme - songs from Iron Maiden, Deep Purple, and Motley Crue make cruising on the bike a more immersive expereince.

There are also motorcycle races, and DAMN they're hard. I haven't beaten one yet due largely to what I suspect are sweeping improvements made to the opponent's AI. Where the car races often featured pileups of your foes around corners and other silliness that made taking first place easier, the motorcyclists you face handle corners with skill. On top of that, the races feature combat in the form of a baseball bat that you can swing left and right, and your opponents have that, too.

There's a set of 25 turf war missions where you run down a rival biker gang and fight it out - these seem pretty easy so far but are nonetheless fun. There are new weapons to use including a sawed-off shotgun, and new multiplayer modes to try them out in that I have yet to play.

With your cell phone you can call up your gang brothers for backup at times, and eventually do some side missions for a corrupt politician whose first scene in the game features a little something for the ladies - full frontal male nudity. Rockstar's designers must be laughing their ass off at the inclusion of that, pushing the envelope of what you can do in a game in yet another bold new direction, at the same time making its largely male audience a bit squeamish.

And in my last play session I encountered a new random-character-on-the-street mission, so there must be more of those too. As with the main game, radio newscasts often mention the things you've done recently, and it's always cool to hear them. You hear the reports of Nico's antics as well, which helps you keep a rough idea of the timeline together in your head.

The safehouses of Nico are replaced for Johnny with a solitary gang clubhouse, which features the usual - a place to sleep/save, a TV and computer with internet access, and a safe place to park. Your gang brothers hang out there, too, and you can engage them in a game of pool, or try new challenges such as arm wrestling or the card game High - Low. That game is particularly fun, if just to watch and listen to your gang brothers' reactions to changes of fortune in the cards.

And finally, there's a system of gang member skill and experience that I've yet to fully grasp. All of this makes a far more total package than say - Fable 2 : Knothole Island - which pales in comparison, and in spite of my kind words about it at the time, ended up having some major bugs for which there are no excuses. But I digress.

What The Lost and Damned represents is a move toward something I've always wanted to see in an expansion or sequel. It takes the immense and detailed playground provided by Grand Theft Auto IV and gives players new adventures in it. A city that big must have a million stories to tell, and The Lost and Damned is the way to tell another one.

I'd like to see more games come out and then add new chapters as was done here. The old model of release a game, then a sequel that rarely follows the timeline, characters, mythology, and even locations of the first one (thus creating a dissonance, a detachment, and often continuity issues) has been one I'd like to see go away. Try to string together all the Zeldas and you'll know what I mean.

Imagine a game release where a design like this was planned all along. The team puts out a complete game, and concurrent with the design of that game plans a series of post-completion episodes that take the characters on new adventures. Crafted like a season of a television show, perhaps. If the writing is as good as it was for Grand Theft Auto IV, creating such interesting characters, I'd want to follow their story beyond the main game.

What the Lost and Damned has done is the best step in that direction I've yet seen. In addition, it's the most robust downloadable content package I've encountered. Another new chapter of Grand Theft Auto IV is planned for this fall, and I'll be there. Maybe by then, I've have actually finished The Lost And Damned and be really ready for more.

The Multi-Pronged Winter Videogame Attack

2009-03-13T17:18:00.000-07:00

Normally, all the great games come out during the holiday season, from September to December, and after that things get quiet for awhile. Players spend those long months sans new releases, catching up on games they originally passed up in the fall.

That was then, this is now. In terms of new releases so far this year I've gotten Deadly Creatures (Wii), Madworld (Wii), Grand Theft Auto IV : The Lost and Damned (XBox 360),and Resident Evil 5 (Xbox 360).

Another thing that occurs after the holidays are price drops on some games, and I've gotten Fracture (XBox 360), plus the three free XBox 360 games I received back in January. On top of that, I encountered a rare copy of Eternal Ring, a Kings Field-like game by (oddly enough) the makers of King's Field at a local flea market for five dollars. I had to get that!

And I've still got Metroid Prime 3 : Corruption (Wii), Okami (Wii), and the first two Castlevania games for the DS left over from Christmas. Left over from last year are the still entertaining online modes for Grand Theft Auto IV, Left 4 Dead, and Farcry 2.

As ever, since I got the XBox 360, it's a problem of too many games and not enough time. I'm not complaining, mind you, because it's a better problem to have than the opposite. This game backlog has created, however, a concurrent backlog of unwritten blog entries - reviews especially.

Soon, I hope to get to the list on my desk of blog articles I need to write. If there's anyone out there still reading - please stand by.

Beaten : Just Cause

2009-03-10T16:17:00.001-07:00

Okay, this is my last entry about Just Cause, and XBox 360 game that can be found in the bargain bins of game stores everywhere, got mediocre reviews, and absolutely enthralled me all through its spectacular ending.

Yes, I have beaten Just Cause. Battled my way through dozens of towns, drug cartel mansions, and military bases and liberated them all. Completed the conveniently mapped-out collection quests. Finished all the story missions including the insanely hard ending. I'd like to go into detail about that ending in the next few paragraphs, so SPOILER ALERT! DO NOT read the next few paragraphs if you wish the ending missions to remain a secret.

SPOILERS ABOUT ENDING AHEAD

The ending is a series of three main story missions all strung together. It starts out in the strangest way, with your handlers picking you up in a helicopter and flying you halfway out to the island where the palacial estate of El Presidente is located. You can't take control of the helicopter, nor are you close enough to the island to parachute the rest of the way. All you can do is exit the helicopter and land in the water.

Try to capture a nearby boat and speed to shore with it and you'll be blown away by helicopter gunships. Try to swim the rest of the way and you'll be killed by clusters of explosions that I can only assume are depth charges of some sort. What I ended up doing - and this is madness - was capturing a boat and returning back to the main island shore, calling for an airdrop of my trusty gyrocopter, flying high back out and over the President's island, and free falling into his compound.

The compound is of course protected by multiple tanks, but as I came close to the ground the objective appeared to take out a certain tank. After repeated deaths here I finally got lucky - I think - the time I landed to the side of the palace. I'm not sure if the boss tank took himself out or what, but almost immediately upon landing off to the side of the building, I got a checkpoint and was issued a new objective.

That objective took me deeper into the island, and higher, to another presidential retreat. There are enemy tanks, helicopters, and now jets that buzz by and carpet-bomb your ass back to the checkpoint. I found that staying in the wooded areas on my way up the hill seemed to keep me safer.

Again I got lucky, as I took the long way around the cliff leading up to the retreat and activated the next objective (which has a timer). I was not really near the retreat, but rather running along a steep cliff with part of the building overhanging above me when the new objective appeared. So I might have gotten lucky here, too.

The final objective of part one was to scamper down the cliff to a seaside airstrip, where you finally get a save point, as well as a jet. The jet is used in the second of the three parts of the finale to take down three missiles and then chase down the president's plane and board it. Another save occurs after that.

The third and final part of the story mission involves fighting your way through the elite guards of the president and then facing the man himself. He jumps out of the plane, of course, and the last challenge involves free falling and parachuting to catch up with the deposed tyrant during his own jump, and then attaching an explosive to him. It's a good thing I played around with the parachuting aspect of the game before this mission, or I would have had more trouble with this.

Finishing the game liberates the remaining territory and starts the credits. After the credits, the game world is open and ready for players wishing to finish any side missions or such - I still have about four races I haven't beaten yet, and there are plenty of side missions I could do, should I feel like trying.

SPOILER SEQUENCE ENDS HERE

What was so great about Just Cause? The massive, lush, tropical game world for starters. I'm sure it dwarfs Liberty City and it's fun to explore. Some players might find the vast, open swaths of jungle lacking in details or points of interest, but I see it as an absolutely necessary part of the package when such a massive world is crafted.

The islands of San Esperito do have details, like winding roads through the mountains, gorgeous beaches, small villages not marked on the map, and so forth. There are offshore oil platforms, big cities with skyscrapers, stunt tracks, and many other details to be uncovered for gamers who can appreciate the depth of design offered here.

The vehicles are also very fun, diverse, and easy to control. From tanks to jet skis, from monster trucks to that awesome gyrocopter, players will find that getting around the vast island chain can be as fun as the missions themselves. The weapons are good, too, but not all that crazy.

Just Cause is another great sandbox game that offers tons of content and an unprecedented virtual world whose size and scope boggles the mind through the end. The good news is that a sequel is slated for later this year. I can't wait to see what the designers of this game pull off this time.

Strategy Session - Just Cause

2009-03-08T15:54:00.001-07:00

"Strategy Session" is a new series of articles where I share strategies I've developed from playing specific games. Yes, it's an homage to a column of the same name that appeared in Electronic Games magazine back in the eighties. To start out this series, here's some strategies I've developed for capturing military bases in Just Cause.

In Just Cause for the XBox 360, players liberate towns, cities, drug cartel bases, and military bases in order to progress the story, unlock safehouses, and most importantly capture territories. Generally, the towns and drug cartel bases are easy pickings, but later in the game players will have to take whole cities and military bases, and these are guarded by fierce, one-or-two-hit kill tanks.

The player starts the liberation outside the base by talking to one of the guerillas, who is usually standing near some ammo that will be available once you activate the mission.

For cities, it's a fairly easy matter of killing lots of government troops and destroying their vehicles long enough to activate the flag capture. Once the on-screen prompt appears, head for the flag and press A to capture the city. Small tanks will appear after awhile on the streets of these cities, so a good overall strategy is to head for the alleyways and try to avoid their heavy, concussive gunfire.

Military bases seem to be the toughest things to capture in the later parts of the game because of the multitude of tanks that roll out to defend them. The first part of any town, drug cartel base, or military base liberation is always the same - kill the government troops. Then destroy the first barricade. Repeat the kill troops/blow up blockade offensive two more times, and the flag appears.

The problem is those pesky tanks. They can, from a distance, draw a bead on you and in seconds land two or three blasts, killing you before you can react or even see where the hell the shelling is coming from. After many, many deaths at these installations, I had to develop some strategies that, while not 100% guaranteed to work for every liberation, helped me at least get through them faster.

As stated earlier, almost all of these liberations start at a little ammo depot outside the main gate, with the first objective to kill government soldiers. I started out there with the rocket launcher, and clicked on the right analog stick to go into a better over-the-shoulder aiming mode. Blasting away at the troops, and then the barricade, I often could catch any tanks that showed up early as well. Before heading in, I restocked my rocket launcher ammo one last time.

Sometimes you have to get inside the base before the tanks are rolled out. So assuming this strategy gets you past the first barricade most of the time, once inside it's time to keep an eye out for tanks. Keep in mind that bringing your own tank is futile - it will be destroyed in seconds by rocket fire from the helicopters or other tanks. Bringing your own helicopter gunship is also futile, as it will be taken out by units on the ground with surface-to-air missiles.

Once past the first barricade, and sadly away from that ammo stash where you started the liberation, look for the tanks while killing enemy troops. Often the tanks will be just behind, and sometimes stuck on, the next barricade. If you see a tank there, seek cover immediately, keeping in mind the the concussive blast of the tank is so powerful that you can get hurt even with an indestructable building between the two of you.

Tanks that come rolling out to you, not firing but getting close, can usually be easily captured as they roll by, either by pressing Y or using the grappling gun if the tank is moving by fast. They seemed to often blow past me and outside the base before turning around and firing. Capturing a tank is a great way to neutralize it. The driver will be thrown out and won't return.

Because the other tanks will immediately know that you took over one of their brothers, they'll begin firing immediately, so the best strategy is to capture and immediately exit, unless you know for sure that there are no other tanks in the immediate area. Repeat this as best you can, avoiding enemy fire. Sometimes you'll have to circle around a few buildings to outflank a tank that is positioned behind emeny lines.

Enemy tanks have a higher rate of fire than the ones you capture, so taking them on is not recommended. The one or two shots they get at your tank before you can switch to the cannon and get off one shot is enough to end your liberation.

The grapple is often useful in tank-heavy liberations, too. There are usually helicopter gunships raining bullets down on you and your AI comrades during these battles, which can be ignored as long as you keep moving. If tanks are firing into your area, you can sometimes make a safe exit by grappling onto a helicopter and jumping back down into the battlefield at another place - sometimes even onto a tank or near enough to capture it. Don't capture the helicopter, though, as it will be instantly shot down by the previously mentioned SAMs.

It takes a few good shots with the rocket launcher to take out a tank, and you can only carry 6 at a time, so I rarely ever resorted to using it, except as a backup. Grenades, while plentiful around the battlefield, aren't as useful it seemed when attempting to take out a tank.

The AI in Just Cause is very strange at times. A military base liberation can start out with two tanks barreling right to the front gate and unleashing unholy death to you and your fellow guerillas, and the next time, a solitary jeep might show up first.

Repeated attempts will almost certainly be necessary to capture the military bases in the later parts of Just Cause, but patience and perseverance, in conjunction with these strategies to deal with the tanks, will hopefully lead to your own liberation of San Espirito as they did mine.

More On Just Cause

2009-03-01T11:56:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, I've been playing Just Cause for the XBox 360. After many more hours of playing, I can safely say that "just cause" it's not Grand Theft Auto IV doesn't mean it's a bad game.

It's certainly bigger than GTA IV, and while it may not have all that much variety in it's immense, open landscape, it's still got plenty to do. The main story missions destabilize regions of the map, which allow the player to go there and help the guerillas capture towns and military bases, which when enough of them are captured will switch the whole province to guerilla control.

In addition to helping the rebels overthrow the government, the player gets to help one drug cartel beat down on its rival by taking over various bases. All of this unlocks more safehouses, weapons, and vehicles. Each place you overrun offers side missions, too, many of which are similar, but they can be fun as well.

Fun is the key component of this game's design. The fighting requires very little effort against human foes, as targeting is essentially automatic. If you're aiming anywhere near your foe you'll be hitting him. Fun also comes into play with the travel and the stunts one can perform. You can parachute out of your helicopter, steer yourself just right, and land on the roof of a moving car, and then take it over. You can use a grappling gun to latch onto a copter and have it drag you into the air. I found myself laughing out loud as I performed insanely silly stunts just to get around.

The save system is fine with safehouses littered about, and even in combat it's fairly easy to stay healed. Another cool gameplay fascilitating design choice - you can call for an air drop of a heavily-armed SUV, a motorcycle, a fast and also fully-armed boat (when you're in the water), and eventually a small one-man gyrocopter.

The ease of gameplay and repetitiveness of the base capture missions may wear thin at first, but patient gamers will find later in the game that their tactics must adapt to tougher situations. I thought I was hot shit once I got ahold of a helicopter gunship, wiping out enemies on the ground with wild abandon, taking many towns and drug mansions - until I tried it at a military base and died instantly to a surface-to-air missile fired from the ground.

Some military bases are guarded by tanks later in the game, too, which again call for a change in the player's strategy when attempting to take them. Sometimes it's just luck, too, such as when a threating tank accidentally sticks itself on a conrete barrier and can't hit the player.

The main story missions are fun, and show brief cut scene glimpses of the characters before and after. In addition to these missions, the base capture missions, and the side missions, there are race missions, too, where players race against the clock to reach checkpoints (rather than race AI controlled cars and the like). The races I've run vary quite nicely, from a cliffside car race to a speedboat race to a motorcycle stunt run.

The music and sounds are also very cool, adding some Latin flavor to the game's setting or some rockin' travelling music to a long helicopter flight. A few minor glitches can occur here and there, but for the most part they are not game-stopping or even annoying.

So Just Cause - it isn't GTA IV or FarCry 2, but it is nonetheless another huge open-world masterpiece. If you're one of those kinds of gamers who gets bored easily or overwhelmed by a large map and total freedom to explore it, this might not be the game for you. For me, it's a lot of fun.

Videogame Glossary : Breakthrough

2009-02-16T13:20:00.000-08:00

A breakthrough refers to a gameplay session where the player gets past being stuck on a particular puzzle or challenge in a game, usually on the first new attempt after being vexed by it and giving up during a previous gameplay session.

Sometimes a breakthrough can occur months or years after the player has given up on the game and moved on to other games. Breakthroughs occur with such regularity in videogaming that they can be used as a mental exercise to avoid excessive frustration.

Breakthroughs seem to be reliant on games designed with more frequent save points. In games where the save points are far apart, and thus the player is forced to repeat several very challenging tasks just to return to the point where they were stuck, the likelihood of breakthoughs diminish greatly. The trend in modern games is away from this sort of design, though.

Videogame Glossary : Fountain

2009-02-16T12:59:00.000-08:00

A fountain refers to a place in a videogame where the player can acquire unlimited healing and/or currency, usually through repeated tasks.

The term originates (for me personally, since this is my own glossary) from The Legend of Zelda (NES), where fountains exist with fairies that heal the player each time the player returns. By staying within a few screens of the one with the fountain, the player can fight nearby monsters, acquire their rupees, and return when their injuries warrant it.

Another example of a fountain would be the place in Beyond Good and Evil where newly loaded sections of the game world respawn breakable crates that may contain useful healing items. By crossing the boundary between the sections and enduring the loading screens over and over, the player who is low on health may regenerate it before facing the new challenges that lie ahead.

Although the gameplay aspect of working a fountain may seem repetitious, it often has the advantage of safely advancing the player's finances to obtain better items sooner than they would through normal adventuring.

Videogame Glossary : Beachhead

2009-02-16T12:31:00.000-08:00

A beachhead is usually the first save point in a videogame, or the first place that a gamer can stop, catch their breath, heal, bank, restock, and/or relax.

In many modern games, there are introductory cinema cut scenes at the very beginning, often followed by immediate action and gameplay before the first opportunity to save the game is reached. Hence, establishing the beachhead is normally the main goal of the first gameplay session, to prevent having to repeat tasks like character creation, viewing the opening cut scenes, and replaying through the tutorial sections of the game.

Some games also have an autosave feature that may engage after the opening cut scenes or levels, and the player is usually notified of this with an onscreen message. A beachhead (and even the urgency of getting to one) is something that varies greatly from game to game depending on the design.

Videogame Glossary : Introduction

2009-02-16T12:06:00.000-08:00

I've come to realize that as I've been playing videogames for the past 33 years, I've developed my own set of terms for things I experience in many of those games.

A search of the internet reveals that others have assembled more generic videogame glossaries, which can be useful for underestanding the common terms used by most gamers and in the games industry:

A retro-gamer's view from Recycled Gaming

A guide for unknowing parents at What They Play : A Parent's Guide To Gaming

A scholar's view at Half-Real

But I've got my own terms to add to the lexicon. Look for upcoming posts on this blog detailing these terms under the label "Videogame Glossary" as I remember them.

Three Free Xbox 360 Games

2009-02-09T14:06:00.000-08:00

A co-worker of mine decided, after years of pledged fanboy loyalty to the Xbox brand and much deriding of Sony, the PS3, its price, and Metal Gear Solid 4, to trade in his XBox 360, controllers, and extensive game library (I'd estimate at least 10 games, possibly more, including last fall's big name titles like Gears of War 2, Left 4 Dead, Fable 2, Fallout 3 and previous hits like Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4) for a Playstation 3, a controller, and three games.

Now, I hate to look a gift horse (I'll get to the gift part in a moment) in the mouth, but this trade boggles my mind. Over a thousand dollars worth of spending for $400-$500 worth of return. Gaming is an expensive hobby, but to be this fickle with it just makes it much worse.

The reasons he cited were twofold. One, that a lot more of his friends have PS3s and he could therefore play more online games with them. I guess that makes sense, but it's a helluva a price to pay to do it.

Second, he believes that he's played all of the Xbox 360 exclusives and it's time to move on to the PS3 exclusive titles. That assumption - that the 360 is done with exclusive games and content - could be easily disputed by a quick look at what little is already known about this year's 360 exclusives, nevermind the fact that Microsoft usually keeps a lot of their fall release plans quiet until the summer's E3 expo.

Whatever his reasons, there were some games in his library that were not worth trading in, because Gamestop (or Gamecrazy, wherever he went) would only offer fifty cents for them. So he brought them into work and generously gave three of them to me. I've had about two weeks with these games, and thus have had a chance to play them enough to see that I made out pretty good.

Prey
I played Prey first, and was blown away by the sheer quality of this title. In spite of my attentiveness to gaming history, I had never heard of this amazing game. When I first fired it up though, and saw the 3D Realms logo, I had a feeling I had started playing something special. I was right.

Prey is a first-person shooter telling the story of Native American Tommy, who along with his grandpa and girl, get swept aboard an alien spaceship that's here to eat us all. The twists on the FPS genre include spirit-walking (astral projection, useful for getting through force fields and deactivating them), and Super Mario Galaxy-esque gravity flipping, as well as Portal-esque portals.

I read up on the history of Prey on Wikipedia, and found out that its development was started in 1995, it was shown off at E3 shows in '97 and '98, went through at least three development iterations, finally getting released to the public in the summer of 2006 for PC as well as Xbox 360. Whew.

And here it is, 2009, and I'm playing it and having a blast. So much so that I finished it in just a few days (with some long gameplay sessions in there - it was like a good book I couldn't put down). The level design, character design, alien weapons, and other aspects like the flying exoskeleton pods and the lack of any real death in the game all made for a memorable experience. I thanked my fickle co-worker profusely after beating Prey.

Monster Madness : Battle for Suburbia
This top-down Gauntlet/Zombies Ate My Neighbors knock-off is the most poorly designed piece of trash I've yet seen on a modern day console. Clearly made for - well no one really - the gameplay involves 1-4 players fighting zombies and other cliched monsters through suburban landscapes riddled with objects to collect.

The camera is pretty bad, but only occasionally makes the game unplayable. There are invisible walls in strange places, such as on rooftops - you can go up on a rooftop, but there is an invisible wall at the top so you can't go down the other side. I encountered one such wall on a rooftop that, as I walked into it, pushed my character off of the roof. I found a building that, when I walked around it, was missing the back walls.

There were a few laughs to be had in the game's style, such as a loading screen tip that said "Your mom's a loading screen tip", but for the most part the adolescent jokes fell flat on this middle-aged gamer's sense of humor. One boss fight was against Bob Zombie, a stereotyped rastafarian who spoke with a Jamaican dialect and breathed smoke on the stereotyped nerdy character I was playing. So was it a take on Rob Zombie or Bob Marley? Your guess is as good as mine.

After playing one major chapter of the game, I put it away. It just wasn't fun. Nor polished.

Just Cause
I've only just gotten a little into Just Cause. It's a big - really BIG - sandbox Grand Theft Auto style game that takes place on a Latin American island nation. It's got vehicles, guns, main story missions, side missions, factions, and some cool new aspects like stunts (jumping off your moving car as it goes off a cliff and deploying your parachute, for example).

I'm having fun with it, but again it's so big that right now it's intimidating, and I'm not sure how varied the side missions are going to end up being. But it is indeed polished, highly playable, and has a style that works, so I think I'll be travelling around the beautifully rendered tropical islands in the game for some time.

So, for three free games, it looks like two of them are winners. I've seen Just Cause recently for less than $20 in the bargain bins of Circuit City, and I'm sure similar prices are to be found at Gamestop for that title as well as Prey. If you're looking for some cheap Xbox 360 thrills, and those games sound like your cup of tea, then go for it. Stay away from Monster Madness, though - it's not even worth "free".

Coolest DVD Packaging Ever

2009-02-09T13:57:00.000-08:00

My favorite thing on television these days is the amazing cartoon known as The Venture Brothers, a Cartoon Network Adult Swim show that after three seasons just keeps getting better and better.

The aforementioned season three is about to come out on DVD, and look at the packaging:

Classic Atari 2600 cartridge packaging. Awesome.

Beaten : FarCry 2 - And a Warning

2009-01-19T09:23:00.000-08:00

I finished FarCry 2 this morning, after over three weeks and 49.5 hours of game time, and lots of exploring and driving around. I did not get all of the game's 221 diamond briefcases (a very challenging collection quest), all of the weapons and upgrades, nor all of the Jackal tapes.

As I stated in my previous review, the game is not stingy with save points, but something every XBox 360 owner should know is that there is apparently a corrupted game save bug where some of your saves will lock up the whole console when you try to load them.

It began for me in Act 2, mostly at save points that occurred when completing a mission. I surmised that perhaps it was the fact that, in those situations, I was still embroiled in combat and action on the screen when the pop-up for the save materialized.

However, in Act 3, the corrupted saves began occurring more regularly, even at normally quiet save points. The only ones that seemed to be free of this glitch were the ones that occurred in safe houses, so after several frustrating repeats of previous missions (and travelling to those missions), I began a strict practice of making my way to safe houses to make backup saves.

So to those XBox 360 owners who decide to play FarCry 2, be warned. Make multiple saves at safe houses after each major event. I also found one glitchy roadside checkpoint that I couldn't scout, and I tried many, many times, so I ended my game with 56 out of 57 of those scouted. At least I was able to unlock all of the safe houses.

In spite of these minor issues, I really did have fun with FarCry 2 - it had the right mix of exploration and action to keep me hooked. I may go back to previous saves and do some more exploring, and I may also try out the online modes.

Fable 2 : Knothole Island Quick Review

2009-01-19T09:15:00.001-08:00

I finished Fable 2 last fall, and while I enjoyed the experience, I thought it was too short and a bit too easy. After beating it I explored the land more thoroughly, and had a great time finding things in all the nooks and crannies. Still, the world felt a bit small.

Last week it got a little bigger, as Knothole Island was opened up via downloadable content for the game, at a cost of ten dollars (800 Microsoft points). It had a new town and a new quest, which I explored and went through pretty fast. There's also a sort of a scavenger-hunt quest and a collection quest to do.

Other than that there are some new weapons, clothes, and other items, as well as one really cool thing that I cannot spoil. Knothole Island isn't much, but it's done a good job of making me interested in the overall game again, at least for awhile. Whether or not such an add-on is worth the time to some gamers is entirely subjective, but I've enjoyed it and hope that more such additions are on the way.

Circuit City Clearance Acquisitions

2009-01-19T09:02:00.000-08:00

Tragic as it is, Circuit City is closing all of its stores, including the one just down from the street from my apartment. Monique and I stopped in yesterday to see what kind of videogame deals were there.

Games are currently at 10% off of their regular price, so mainstream titles aren't that big of a deal yet. However, in the bargain bins, I found 2 Nintendo DS games and one Game Boy Advance game that I wanted, each priced below ten dollars. I picked up Picross DS, Nanostray 2 (also DS), and Marble Madness / Klax for the GBA.

Picross DS is a particularly great find. It's a challenging logic-puzzler that I'm really getting into. Nanostray 2 is an old school shoot-em up, and looks really good on the DS. Marble Madness / Klax are classic arcade game translations that make great additions to our GBA library.

There were a few XBox 360 and Wii games in that bin that were priced in their teens, so I'll be going back to Circuit City in a few days to see if the prices have dropped again. It may take some time, patience, and luck, but I'm hoping to score a few more deals out of this unfortunate circumstance.

My best wishes go out to all those Circuit City employees and managers who have to endure the craziness of this closeout.

More Proof That The Nintendo DS Rocks

2009-01-19T08:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture of my wife Monique using Personal Trainer Cooking for the Nintendo DS to put together a shopping list for last night's meal. The DS also sat on the counter as she prepared the meal, taking her step by step through the cooking process, utilizing the microphone to move forward via voice prompts. The meal turned out really well.

In addition to recipes, the program also has instructions on knife techniques and such, presented in video form. I just thought it was cool. I love having productivity applications as well as games for our portable game systems.

Club Nintendo and the Game and Watch Collection

2009-01-15T13:41:00.000-08:00

Awhile back, I decided to register all of my Nintendo consoles and software on their website, which was called "My Nintendo" at the time. That's five pieces of hardware (GBA SP, GBA Micro, Gamecube, DS, and Wii) and nearly fifty titles for those systems.

So when they announced that they were bringing Japan's Club Nintendo over to these shores, with its points and rewards, I was pretty happy. I figured that I'd have enough points to get one of every prize they offered.

Not so much. It turns out that you have to both resiter a game AND fill out a survey for it to get the points. So did I have to fill out fifty-plus surveys? Becuase, I would be willing to endure that for free stuff.

Again, not so much. Not everything you register has a survey, and thus, not everything you register can get you points (or, as you might suspect with Nintendo, the points are "coins"). So only a portion of my registered games (and none of the hardware) elicited a survey. Most of the surveys were for very recent releases.

It was still a pretty tediuos task. Each survey had five questions, the last being a mandatory write-a-comment section. I got fifty points for every Wii game I was surveyed about, and 30 for each DS game. Looking at the available prizes, there was only one I was truly after.

The only actual game they offered was the Nintendo Club exclusive Game and Watch Collection. Game and Watch was a series of LCD handhelds created by the late Gunoei Yokoi, who went on to create a handheld revolution by inventing the Game Boy. This DS game was the one of the two most costly items available through Club Nintendo, going for 800 points.

Once I had gone through all my surveys, I was short on coins. Story of my life! Then I remembered that there were a few new purchases that Monique and I had made since I originally registered most of our collection with Nintendo, so I sought out those titles. And sure enough, I had exactly 800 points when I was done.

So the exclusive (did I mention that already?) Game and Watch Collection game came for the DS today. It has a faithful reproduction of three Game and Watch games from the Multicreen series, which is a natural choice since the games in that series of handhelds featured the same two-screen clamshell design that the DS sports today. The games included in the title are Oil Panic, Donkey Kong, and Green House.

They're all presented authentically on the DS, down to the slight after-images of the LCD displays that aren't lit up. And they're fun to play, offering that simple 80s arcade game thrill that us middle-aged gamers still cherish. My only gripe is that they call three games a "collection"? Really, with the power of the DS they could have put most of the Multiscreen series on this cartridge, obviously excepting the licensed properties such as Mickey Mouse, Popeye, and Snoopy that appeared.

Still, it was a free DS game, and an exclusive, so I guess I really can't complain. I hope by the time I get another 800 Club Nintendo points, though, they have some other great selections like the Game and Watch Collection.

Game of the Year Awards

2009-01-05T19:25:00.000-08:00

At last, the time has come to pick my Videogame of the Year, as well as three runners-up and my pick for best new hardware. This tradition goes back to 1981, when I was 15 years old and had just gotten an Odyssey 2 for Christmas. Why I started it and continued it through all these years, I'm not sure. But the show must go on!

It was a banner year for great videogames, with many of the games that I beat this year all likely nominees. But I had to narrow it down, so here's what I came up with. Keep in mind, the award has always been for the games I personally played in that year, which does not necessarily mean that the game was released in the same year.

Winner : Grand Theft Auto IV (Microsoft XBox 360)
2008 was the year of the open-world "sandbox" type of game for me, and GTA IV was the biggest and baddest of them all. No one has ever made a larger, more detailed virtual world (much less a sprawling metropolis) that can come close to what Rockstar Games achieved with this title. But it's not just the size - the sheer number of things that your character can do in this game also adds to the value of this package.

And if all that weren't enough, the story and the characters are well produced, eliciting sympathy for the lead character and his friends, even though their in-game actions could certainly be considered sociopathic. Grand Theft Auto IV is really the whole enchilada, and the four months it took to beat it are a testament to its polish, playability, and sheer fun.

Runner - Up : The Orange Box (Microsoft XBox 360)
Not since Sppedway/Spinout/Crypto-Logic for the Odyssey 2 has a three-pack of games so completely defined my first days with a new videogame system. Included in The Orange Box are Half-Life 2 (plus its expansion episodes), Portal, and Team Fortress 2. Portal itself was the most amazingly innovative game I played in 2009, a first-person puzzle and action game that challenged my brain in ways no other game ever has, and offered one of the best endings in game history. Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 and 2 were stunning first-person shooting bliss of the highest order. And the class-based Team Fortress 2 provided a lot of online multiplayer fun.

Runner - Up : Dead Space (Microsoft XBox 360)
Survival-horror games have, ironically, been done to death, so it takes a new approach to really stand out in the crowd. Dead Space puts the player in the role of an engineer on a derelict spaceship full of horrific creatures, and the game's innovations work well to refresh the genre. The undead "necromorphs" require the player to shoot off their limbs to stop them, instead of headshots. The game's weapons are for the most part innovative and fun to enhance, and the zero-gravity sections of the ship work amazingly well. Dead Space was a blast to play, was graphically impressive, and offered many scares along the way.

Runner - Up : Bully : Scholarship Edition (Nintendo Wii)
Another one of Rockstar Games' "sandbox" titles, Bully puts the player in the role of tough kid Jimmy, dumped by his parents at a strict boarding school divided into factions of nerds, jocks, preppies, greasers, and townies. Jimmy not only has to survive all of that, but he has to actually attend school as well, with the Wii's motion controls being utilized to their fullest to do things like dissect frogs in Biology class. Exploring the school and the local community was as much fun as exploring the game's social aspects, like juggling girlfriends and learning fighting moves from the local hobo. There was a lot to do in Bully, and the game's hilarious sense of humor made it all worth the time.

Best New Hardware : Microsoft XBox 360 Pro System

And those are my awards. Your mileage may vary.

Farcry 2 Review

2009-01-05T09:47:00.000-08:00

Remember back in July of last year when I was enjoying Half Life 2, in particular the level where you travel along a remote coastline in a dune buggy. The feeling of openness and exploration was refreshing in my own personal first-person shooter experience, as most of those games take place indoors in cramped hallways.

Farcry 2 is that level of Half Life 2 times a thousand. It's an open-ended sandbox FPS, with all sorts of missions, both main story ones and fun side ones. You travel along dusty roads, through run-down African towns, jungles, wide-open savannahs, sandy deserts, rocky terrains, and swamps and rivers. How do you travel, you might ask? In various trucks, officially licensed Jeeps, boats, and other special modes of transport that shall remain unnamed because they are too cool to reveal.

Getting around is made easier with a great built-in map system, but the game also comes with a helpful paper map to use as well. Grand Theft Auto IV did this, too, and it really warms an old-school gamer's heart to see paper maps included in videogames once again.

So the explorer in me, probably the biggest part of my gaming psyche, is in heaven. How are the graphics and gameplay then? Well the graphics are just stunning. I've never seen such great visuals on plants in a game before. This African nation is gorgeously realized, from the aforementioned fauna to the run-down look of the huts made from scraps of metal debris, to the wildlife such as zebras and gazelle.

I stood there the other day watching a zebra grazing through my sniper scope, it's movements natural down to its ears twitching and its head picking through the grass. There are moments like that all through the game (I'm at 23% completion now), like the sun rising and waterfalls splashing.

The combat is pretty standard FPS stuff, but the enemy AI is certainly worthy of note. It's very off and on. Enemies will do amazingly smart things, like flanking you, and crawling away when injured to hide in wait until you get closer, but sometimes they are incredibly dumb and won't even see you when you're right next to them. Mostly, though, they are cunning and offer a good fight.

And fight them you will. The two warring factions of the game seem to have an endless supply of these ragtag soldiers, as an outpost you clear out will be restaffed when you come back, as long as you go a good distance away.

While we're on the subject of fighting, now might be a good time to talk about the game's weapons. You have three slots - a pistol slot, a rifle/machine gun slot, and a big gun slot for rocket launchers and the like, plus a grenade slot. Realism is the design choice here, and in the case of tiny little African wars, the weapons are rusty old hand-me downs from previous conflicts, so the ones you find on fallen foes tend to jam on you at the worst times, or even break in your hands.

The solution to this is the game's weapon shops, which allow you to purchase better ones, as well as upgrade them. You get a free restock of ammo at these places, and for the most part, ammo can be found pretty readily at most of those checkpoints that you'll clear again and again (remember the restaffing speed I mentioned earlier). You can also buy storage crates, so that extra weapons can be held in reserve at the many safe houses you'll unlock.

At those safehouses, which also upgrade through normal gameplay, you can save and restock on health and ammo, and you'll almost always find a vehicle there. The game is not stingy with save points in general, nor vehicles, so the frustration level is very low when you fail a mission. You maintain an entourage of "buddies", who will come to your rescue if you fall in battle, reviving you and giving you a second chance to finish things. You might have to heal them, too, though.

The world design has all sorts of hidden pathways and things in it that are a joy to discover, but I won't spoil them here. The story is gritty, of course, and the characters are pretty well fleshed-out, but not all that deep. Nonetheless, when I failed to save one of those buddies that had rescued me a half dozen times before, I felt somewhat saddened.

Like Grand Theft Auto IV, Farcry 2 gives players a great game experience set in one of the most visually impressive, breathtakingly enormous, and brilliantly designed virtual worlds I've ever seen. 2008 was certainly the year for that kind of thing, wasn't it?

Happy New Year

2009-01-02T03:48:00.001-08:00

Welcome to the third year of Middle-Aged Gamer. A few announcements:

My Roadrunner homepage seems to have been wiped out by Roadrunner. All the links to the left that take you there just lead to a blank, blue page. It's strange, because I pay my bill and all that. I don't have the time to investigate it right now, or build a replacement.

One of those links that no longer work is to my annual Game of the Year awards. I usually make the announcement of those awards on January 1, but I an holding off on this until I've had some more time to go through my Christmas games, because I am beginning to suspect that one of them may be a contender. So stay tuned to see the tardiest 2008 Game of the Year award ever gifted on the internet!

Finally, one of my New Year's resolutions is to do more creative things, instead of just sitting there gaming all the time. So look for that, too. It's very likely that those creative things will have to do with gaming and take place on the internet, so none of that means less time writing about videogames, really.

Hope you all had a great 2008, and are looking fine for 2009. It should be another boisterous year for videogaming, barring any further collapse of the economy, or civilization itself.

My Christmas Loot

2008-12-28T02:34:00.000-08:00

I hope everyone had a good gaming Christmas. I sure did. Here's a rundown of what I got:

Metroid Prime 3 : Corruption (Wii) - The final installment in the Metroid Prime series. Long-time readers of this site may remember my frustration with the first game in this series - the bosses were insanely hard, and I never got past the Omega Pirate - but damn, I wanted another first person shooter for the Wii with good controls.

There are reportedly only 2 such shooters for the Wii - this Metroid installment and Medal of Honor Heroes 2, which I'd enjoyed very much last year. With the release date of The Conduit still only listed as "Spring 2009", it was Metroid Prime 3 : Corruption or nothing. I will play as far as I can into Corruption and when it gets too hard, just abandon it. Sounds like a plan!

Okami (Wii) - I played a demo of this game on the Playstation 2 a few years back, and have wanted the Wii version since it came out last spring. I can't wait to get into it.

Castlevania : Dawn of Sorrows (DS) - I've wanted a modern DS Castlevania for some time, and this one certainly fits the bill. Although I've yet to find a whip to use as a weapon, the gameplay is classic, and is mixed in with some great RPG elements. The graphics are superb and the music is epic. The monsters are also well-designed and fun to battle. There's a lot of gameplay here, I suspect.

Castlevania : Portrait of Ruin (DS) - Another one! I'll try this one out after I beat Dawn of Sorrows.

Those first four games were all gifts from my wonderful and understanding wife. Among her gifts from me were two games she wanted - Wario Land : Shake It for the Wii, and Midnight Party Pack for the DS, so I may try those games out, too, when time permits.

The fifth game I got for Christmas was generated from a Gamestop gift card:

Farcry 2 (XBox 360) - An open-world first person shooter with stunning graphics and a huge map to explore. I got an hour or so into it yesterday and was very impressed. The story is cool so far, and the character one plays is sticken with malaria! That's right, you're prone to pass out from time to time as you play. Also, if a gun you picked up from a fallen foe looks rusty, it might just be crap and jam up on you in the middle of a fight!

There's an interesting story about how I acquired Farcry 2 from my local Gamestop. Anyone who went to one of their stores the day after Christmas probably experienced what I did - wall to wall crowds, an obviously overworked and stressed-out staff, and utter chaos everywhere.

I went into the store looking for Farcry 2, and there was no box for it on either the used or new shelves. Without a wandering sales associate to pester about it, I decided to stand in line and take my chances that there were copies behind the register. To their credit, the staff at that store kept things moving along quick, and the line that looked very long translated into a mere ten minute wait for me.

At the register, I asked the clerk about the game, and he looked around behind the counter for it. He failed to find it, and looked on his computer for it too, and it seemed that they were indeed sold out. "What about that copy?", I asked, pointing to a single copy of the game sitting in a stack of other games.

It took him a second to see where I was pointing, but then he took the game from the pile and examined it. There was a small tag attached to the back of it, and he noted "It's being held for someone."

Crestfallen, I began to think if I wanted another game, but before I could finish that thought, the sales associate noted "But he was supposed to be here five hours ago".

"You snooze, you lose", I said.

He agreed, and rang up the game. It got better. The game was on sale for $40, down from its normal $60 price tag. In addition, it was a Gamestop-exclusive pre-order copy with 6 Bonus levels. I thanked the guy behind the counter, hoping that the person who had held the game would never show up and get angry with the staff there.

So, I've gotten five new games for Christmas, which should keep me busy for some time. I'll write full reviews as I delve more deeply into those games.

Beaten in 2008

2008-12-28T02:07:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure with only a few days left in this year, that I've beaten every game that I'm going to beat. So it's time to look back and see what I've accomplished. I've surprisingly finished more games this year than I normally do, something I suspect is because my gaming habits are changing.

With less time and money to devote to gaming, which I'm sure most middle-aged gamers also experience, I've been buying better games and trying to get the most out of them, rather than buying every new game and skimming through it. It helps that the internet provides an unprecedented level of information about new games these days, with professional and less-than-professional reviews everywhere you look, allowing more cautious purchases than in the past.

So here's what I beat this year:

Super Mario Galaxy (119 Stars) - Wii
Medal of Honor Heroes 2 - Wii
Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney Justice For All - DS
Phoenix Wright : Ace Attorney Trials and Tribulations - DS
Apollo Justice : Ace Attorney - DS
Bully : Scholarship Edition - Wii
Portal (on The Orange Box) - XBox 360
Call of Duty 4 - XBox 360
Half Life 2 (on The Orange Box) - XBox 360
Half Life 2 Episode 1 (on The Orange Box) - XBox 360
Half Life 2 Episode 2 (on The Orange Box) - XBox 360
Fable 2 - XBox 360
Portal : Still Alive - XBox 360
Grand Theft Auto IV - XBox 360
Dead Space - XBox 360
Left 4 Dead (survived all 4 campaigns) - XBox 360

Some other games that I beat to varying degrees, but the nature of these games makes it hard to define "beaten" : Super Smash Brothers Brawl, Mario Kart Wii, and Boom Blox.

It was a very good year for gaming, and my own perseverance, coupled with great gameplay, made it a more accomplished year than previous ones. Will these changes continue into 2009? Time will tell.

Welcome, Canadians!

2008-12-15T03:10:00.001-08:00

I've been interviewed by reporter Christopher Poon for a cool article about middle-aged gamers in the Georgia Straight, "Canada's largest urban weekly", published in Vancouver.

There's a link to this blog in there, so I want to wish a warm welcome to all my Canadian visitors. I hope you enjoy the site. Stick around after Christmas for some year-end articles, including my personal selection for Videogame of the Year.

Thanks to Christopher Poon for the shout-out, and I've got to say - Vancouver looks like one really great city. My wife and I have added it to our list of places to take a vacation as soon as we're out of enough debt.

Goodbye To An Old Friend

2008-12-14T18:37:00.000-08:00

I was saddened the other day to learn of the closing of a Toys-R-Us store here in town. There are several locations of that chain here in Columbus, Ohio, but that particular one held some special sentimentality for me. It had been my longest running supplier of videogame software, and I had been purchasing games there for the last six generations, more or less.

I'm from a small town north of Columbus, which had slim pickings in terms of game stores back in the 1980s. So on a road trip to the city on March 28, 1986, I scanned the one part of town I knew for shopping - Morse Road - for software stores, and found that Toys-R-Us.

I was blown away by the sheer selection offered there. They had the games displayed behind glass, with a system where you take a paper ticket to the front to get the game. The game I choose that night was one of the greatest games I had ever played - The Bard's Tale for the Commodore 64. That was the first game I purchased at that store. A few weeks later, I returned on a second road trip (both of these trips were not just for games, but also to party with friends) and got Neutral Zone and another classic game called Sword of Kadash, both again for the C 64.

In late 1986 I moved down to Columbus for good, and continued to build my Commodore 64 collection with more games from that Toys-R-Us store. They always had a selection of the newest games, and obscure titles that I had only seen before in magazines. In addition to the previusly mentioned Sword of Kadash, I picked up the classic Penguin Software games The Crimson Crown and The Quest there, as well as Skyfox 2 : The Cygnus Conflict and Alternate Reality : The City.

After I got my Nintendo Entertainment System in 1989, I picked up games for it at that store. After that, in 1990, I purchased my Turbografx 16 console there, and several games for it. My purchases began to wane after that because of closer locations with more varied product, but I know I got some of my SNES, Genesis, Sega CD, and Playstation 1 games there.

My last videogame purchase at that store was on March 8, 2007, when I got Archer Maclean's 3D Pool for the Game Boy Advance, when I had stopped there to look for a Wii during my Wiiquest. The coolest thing about my last visit there was the sales associate who was kind enough to fill me in on how to get a Wii (show up at any Toys-R-Us early on a Sunday).

So many game stores in my time have come and gone, along with the memories of purchasing great games at those places. I wonder if I'm the only gamer who gets sentiemtnal about those sorts of things.

Oddly enough, the demise of this one Toys-R-Us location makes one of the other ones, the one closest to my current home, the oldest still-existing game store I visit. I've been going to that Toys-R-Us and buying games since August of 1987. Maybe I'll stop there after Christmas and see what's in the clearance bins - for old time's sake.

Left 4 Dead Quick Review

2008-11-29T14:45:00.000-08:00

It's Valve. It's Zombies. What else do you need to know? I said "quick review" right there in the title.

Oh, okay. Here's more.

Left 4 Dead takes the zombie apocalypse genre and does it right - more than right. Then, it tosses out the old cliches, like slow, lumbering zombies and replaces them with spastic "infected" that run at you in huge numbers like those women at the Filene's Basement bridal gown sales. And just to prove how insanely innovative they are, Valve added five special types of infected - sort of mini-bosses, that each have special attacks and abilities.

The single-player is fun, but the online co-op play is really great. It puts the cooperation back in co-op, as players can get stuck in situations that only another player can help them out of. Players can heal each other and revive each other.

I have yet to try out the online versus, where you get to play two teams of four against each other - one survivors and the other as special infecteds - but it looks pretty sweet, too.

There's not much to Left 4 Dead beyond all that. But again, it's Valve, so the game has the absolute highest level of polish in the gameplay, presentation, and level design perhaps possible. The craftsmanship of software engineering from this company shows in every title it makes, and Left 4 Dead is just the latest example of how to do everything - even something as cliched in the videogaming world as zombies - and do it right.

Milestones : Defender

2008-11-25T10:37:00.000-08:00

A joystick and a button. That was all we needed in those early days. The joystick moved your ship or character and the button fired or jumped. A few games went outside that paradigm, adding a button for other features such as a pointlessly risky hyperspace jump (I'm looking at you Asteroids), or replaced the joystick with a slick trakball or paddle, but for the most part the joystick and button served our needs.

Which even at the time seemed silly to us. I mean, it's a spaceship, and the few spaceship interiors we had seen either in reality or fiction all had huge control bridges with banks of consoles on them. Even single-person fighters we had seen in Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica had more than a joystick and a button.

So then Defender appeared. Here's how it appeared to me, on a Saturday night in my rural Ohio hometown.

My friends Andy and Barry were staying overnight in my basement, as we did frequently in those days, to of course gorge ourselves on videogames and snacks. We had Barry's Atari all hooked up, and it was time for a snack run. Andy and I took up that charge, leaving Barry there engrossed in Riddle of the Sphynx.

At Lawson's, a nearby convenience store, there was always one arcade game, and we knew what it was because we were there frequently. Tonight, as we gathered up the snacks, Andy and I noticed that a new game was there, making strange new sounds. This was Defender.

We just stared at the controls and the attract mode (alternating the title screen, the onscreen play demo and the high score chart)for a minute and took it all in. In the middle of the control panel were two buttons, used to select either a one-player game or a two-player one, which was pretty standard at the time.

To the left was the familiar joystick, but it only moved the side-scrolling ship up and down. To the right of the joystick and a little bit down the panel was a strange "reverse" button, which flipped the orientation of the ship from left to right and back again. So these functions would be done with the left hand. I was immediately skeptical of the reverse button.

On the far right side was the good old "fire" button, and to the immediate left of that a "thrust" button. So now we had a joystick and two buttons involved in steering the ship instead of just the joystick handling all of those functions. My closed-minded cynicism grew.

But wait, there's more. To the left and a little bit down from the thrust button was a strange new green button labeled "smart bomb". And way out there in the middle of the control panel, far from either hand, and below the aforementioned player select buttons, was the good old "hyperspace" button, again only recommended if you're about to die, as it will most likely destroy your ship if you use it.

We turned our attention to the screen. It looked incredible. Mountains scrolled by the fast-moving ship, aliens were plucking people off the planet, the ship was shooting the aliens and rescuing them before they hit the ground, there was an incredibly detailed and functionally useful radar screen, and the sound effects which had moments ago gotten our attention from across the store were a symphony of digital carnage.

I put the first quarter in. I died pretty quickly. Andy tried a game. He died pretty quickly. We put down our munchies and went to the counter for more quarters. Our previous doubts about the ship movement controls were the first to go, as we grew accustomed to the tight responsiveness of the reverse button. Andy was the first to pull a quick reverse and fire after flying past an alien ship, which was quite satisfying, as the maneuver seemed to leave the alien ship momentarily confused. I was the first to lose all the humanoids and see the world blow up and the game go crazy. We both figured out almost immediately to be very conservative with our limited supply of smart bombs.

Hours later, we returned to my basement with our munchies, no change left save for a few pennies. Barry had dozed off. We told him about Defender the next day. This title had dragged us out of our primitive control schemes kicking and screaming, demanding with its hardcore difficulty that we adapt to the future of gaming, a challenge we have gladly accepted ever since.

Imagine If You Were Like This

2008-11-19T14:12:00.000-08:00

The first achievement points I got on my XBox 360 were on Half-Life 2, when I threw a soda can at a cop. I had heard of achievment points and gamerscores of course, before I got the system, but at that exact moment I realized what an utterly pointless system of points it was.

In my 38+ years of videogaming, I've never needed any reason to play videogames other than the games themselves. Game designers and programmers create them, and I play them - with a particular personal drive to explore the worlds they create. I've never needed a little sound effect, an on-screen pop-up, and a total number to accompany me on my journeys.

Nor have I needed any methodology to gauge myself against other people playing the same game, which seems to be one of the driving priorities of the "achievment point idolatry generation" (referred to from here on out as APIG ). I play what I want, when I want, how I want, and on my own schedule.

I shudder to think of those gamers for whom achievement points actually matter more than the joy of gaming itself. I know they're out there. Their priorities have centered on their personal comparisons to other gamers' achievements rather than having a good time fully exploring a game world, or trying out different items, classes, or playstyles.

Instead of just gaming and having fun, they have attached their fragile self-image to their hobby to such a degree that their gaming habits are constantly determined by what other people are playing and what they are "achieving".

Let's have fun with an example. We'll use two gamers, called Gamer 1 and 2, who for this example we'll say have some real life contact like school or work where they have time to talk about their gaming. Gamer 1, one of our APIGs, constantly claims to be on a tight budget and has thus made plans to buy only Big Holiday Game B and C this year. Gamer 2, a more casual gamer with an actual life outside of gaming, has been watching reviews for Big Holiday Game A, and decides to get it when it comes out.

Gamer 1 of course, deathly afraid of Gamer 2 getting achievment points he doesn't have, or just playing one of the Big Holiday Games before him and thus putting a chink in his pathetically fragile gamer ego, rushes out and gets Big Holiday Game A as well, and then scrambles to finish it as fast as possible before Gamer 2, who could care less about achievement points or where Gamer 1 is at in the game, because he's having a blast with it.

And so it goes through the holiday releases, with Gamer 1 getting every one of them and beating them in a week, while Gamer 2 plods along with a few games he got, having a good time with complete indifference to Gamer 1's ego. Gamer 1 constantly quizzes Gamer 2 about what he's getting next, so that he too can be there, following him from game to game like the little kid back in elementary school a few grades behind who follows the elder kid around, emulating everything the elder does because he's the coolest person that he knows.

Imagine if you were like Gamer 1. Your entire self-worth defined by competing with and comparing yourself against the other gamers you know in such a manner as described in the example above. None of them offer you any serious competition, because they just don't care (they just play games for the sake of playing games). But you go on from one new release to the next, and you even play really bad games, just to jack up those achievement points and be the first in the circle of people you know to beat them.

It reminds me of the people you sometimes see at a summer blockbuster movie. You're there to watch a movie that you are interested in, and you sit quietly and pay attention to the characters and the story. They talk, fidget, check their cell phones for text messages, and generally don't pay attention to the screen at all. Why are they even there? Because so many of their friends are going, and so that they can say simply that they went, too. Just being able to say you went to the movie has become more important that taking it all in.

And so it goes with the Achievement Point Idolatry Generation (again, the APIGs). Just playing through a game as fast as possible, and culling achievement points, has replaced truly enjoying a game, and watching it unfold as the designers intended. Bragging rights and adolescent egos tied to pointless numbers have replaced the spirit of discovery and the thrill of besting an actual in-game challenge.

I don't think most gamers are like that - yet. Imagine if you were, though, how shallow your enjoyment of your hobby would become. How the other gamers you talk to would dread your presence, and yet - at the same time - gain a greater appreciation of how they just play videogames to - yep - just play them.

Goodbye Ultima Online - Again

2008-11-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

Last night I wrapped up my business in Ultima Online and closed my account, for the third and most likely final time since I first logged on over a decade ago. I hadn't been playing much at all for about the last year, and had been hanging on mostly to hold onto my lighthouse in the game, and out of nostalgia.

My final voyage across the seas of the Atlantic shard (server) was uneventful, seeing no other ships at sea, all for the purpose of carting several trunks of valuables to the bank. I tore down my lighthouse but kept the most valuable items in case I ever want to return.

I doubt I will. I came back last year to help test and play the highly disappointing Kingdom Reborn client, and have done little since then in the game. My old friends are gone, and I never really got my gear up to the standards ushered in by the Age of Shadows expansion over five years ago.

It was a great part of my life, but I no longer have the time or money for it, and the hope that the game could inexplicably make some triumphant comeback in terms of appeal and playability has long since died. I hope it chugs along forever, and that people enjoy playing it, but it will have to go on without the Admiral terrorizing the empty seas.

Portal : Still Alive (and Kicking)

2008-11-04T15:01:00.000-08:00

My leading contender for "Game of the Year" so far in 2008 is Portal. Yes, I know it came out last year, but I'd just gotten an XBox 360 in June, along with The Orange Box, and that's when I got to play it. My previous blog entries detail pretty well my love of this game.

But what about "Portal : Still Alive", recently released on the XBox Live service as a downloadable version of the original with 14 new "Challlenge Levels" added? Well, it's great, too. I've been playing it for the last week, first going through the 19 levels of the original and beating it again before tackling the new levels.

The new levels are, so far, not all that much of a step up in difficulty from anything seen in the original ones. There are some new environmental elements that pop up, though, which makes the new levels feel refreshingly different at times. I won't spoil them other than to say that they are platforming classics.

Missing from the new test chambers is the voice of the computer GLaDOS telling you about cake and such, but this omission is a minor loss. The levels themselves are all good, bringing back that Portal feeling when you swear you can actually hear the wheels turning and sparks clicking in your own noggin when you figure things out. I wish there were more than 14 new levels, but I'll take what I can get.

So the game is fine, but the package - 1200 Microsoft Points - is sort of a rip off for those of us who own the Orange Box. In my opinion, just the new levels should have been available as a free download for Orange Box players alongside the 1200-point whole package offering.

But Portal : Still Alive is what we got, at least for the time being. For myself, it was worth it just to get these new levels and play them. For someone who is only casually attached to Portal, or whose moral compass allows them to deny themselves the absolute joy of new Portal levels to stand firm against such a rip off, this package might not be ideal.

I'm so apeshit for this game that's I'd probably plop down ten dollars every month for another 14 levels. I hope they don't do that, but instead just focus on a proper sequel for a game that certainly deserves one.

And Now I'm Playing Fable II

2008-10-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

One of two games this fall that I'd seen fit to pre-order, (the other being Left 4 Dead) I picked up my copy of Fable II at my local Gamestop's midnight sale, joined by about fifty other eager gamers. Another great reason to pre-order was early access via XBox Live to Fable II : Pub Games, which featured all three casino-style gambling mini-games from Fable II, coupled with the ability to transfer one's winings to their hero when they got the full game.

So I started playing Fable II last week, and have progressed steadily through the game, mostly enjoying myself. It's a game that has a lot going for it, and I like it, but I can't say I think it's the second coming of Zelda or anything of the sort. It's a great game, but not an overwhelmingly groundbreaking one, which is odd considering all the digging one does in the world of Albion.

I'll try to explain why.

On the plus side, it's got a huge world to explore, but allows the player to skip over areas when it comes time to backtrack. Once you go to another area, it's added to the map, becoming only a few clicks away on the Quests / Map tab. The combat is superb, offering hack-and-slash action that's a cut above many recent releases. One button for melee, one for ranged attacks, and one for magic, with a few added abilities for each, makes combat simple and fun, yet challenging and complex at times.

The NPCs, from villagers and guards to farmers and bards, are numerous yet very similar to each other, and react to your deeds and "renown" when they see you. There are many factors which influence they attitude toward the player, and many ways to interact with them, including marriage, sex, and parenting. The whole "Sim Middle Ages" thing is complex, but not all that endearing after messing around with it for a few minutes.

The social aspects might be a feature that I grow to appreciate more in the coming weeks as I play deeper into the game, but so far the game creates no emotional pull when doing things like getting married and having children, other than a brief, narrated cutscene about those institutions, and a few lines of "welcome home" dialogue after a notable absence.

The economic aspects of owning homes and businesses is also detailed, but so far has not been enthralling. It makes for a nice investment, though, raking in rent money from one's properties while out adventuring, and even while offline to some extent, it seems. Again I caution that I'm not that far along with Fable II to safely say that there isn't more importance to the social and economic aspects later in the game, but so far they seem like minor, albeit detailed, bells and whistles.

They do factor into the game's overarching story in terms of players being able to choose good or evil paths through the world. This aspect of the game is well done, harkening back to games like Ultima IV where moral quardries would pop up from time to time, often without clear ideas of the consequences or impacts one's decisions would make. I suspect that this offers the game much replay value as well, as some quests simply cannot be done while maintaining one side or the other.

The story and characters are pretty standard fantasy fare, with tales of triumph and tragedy and mystery, but again, so far, they haven't really endeared themselves all that much. The only character so far that has done that successfully is the much-hyped NPC dog that follows one through the game. It's a marvel and well deserving of all the praise it's been getting.

I have yet to try the innovative online co-op with any of my friends, nor do I see a benefit to it at this time. Perhaps later, when I've completed the game, there may be some parts of the game that will be more fun played that way.

Some minor complaints include slow load times between zones, graphical glitching, slow menus (with another really slow clothes-changing menu a la Grand Theft Auto IV - can't anyone make one of these that works at modern speed?), and extremely tedious work mini-games of blacksmithing, woodcutting, and bartending. I'd almost believe these laborous tasks were designed by former Ultima Online designers.

Really, all gripes aside, Fable II is a pretty good adventure game with great combat and detailed social aspects. Where it bogs down, and what it lacks, are very minor complaints that won't keep anyone from having an enjoyable run through a few towns, dungeons, or wooded areas. I suspect as well that the game will have a longer replay value than most games of this genre, so it's a good value as well as a solid title.

Stomping Around In Dead Space

2008-10-20T12:31:00.000-07:00

I've been watching recent game releases, thinking of picking up a new game for my XBox 360 that would be worthy of the insane sixty dollar price tag. Reviews and free demos of Star Wars : The Force Unleased and Fracture made me decide to wait and see what else was coming out. Last week, I took the plunge and picked up Dead Space, an EA game of survival horror set aboard a huge planet-cracking space ship.

Now, the so-called survival horror genre kind of spent its nickel with me a long time ago, possibly as far back as Resident Evil, when those dogs come jumping through the window. Since then, nothing in gaming really makes me jump out of my seat like that, because every new room I enter, I'm remembering those dogs and am ready for it. You know the cliches, and in many of the genre's titles, Dead Space included, moody music cues you in to impending zombie "gotcha".

Dead Space does all the standard stuff very well, though. It plays with the over-the-right-shoulder view of Resident Evil 4, with your health bar running along your spine as a part of your Celestial-esque (a Jack Kirby/Marvel Comics reference, look it up) space armor. Corpses, debris, and gore are everywhere in the derelict ship, and the monsters that hop out at you consist of mutated things that claw and stab. It's the standard story of the nutjob scientist with delusions of grandeur, down on stagnated human evolution and thinking that somehow savagely violent virus-mutated monsters are the way ahead. And the spaceship is the standard design seen since those Alien movies, with dark metal halls lined with tubes and wires. Yawn.

Everything is very polished from the stunning graphics and moody lighting to the interfaces, heads-up displays, and the controls. My only complaint about the controls is that the inventory takes too long to come up, and one wrong movement on the D-pad can mean trouble if you pass over the med kit you need. The action does not pause when you're digging around in your inventory.

The game would be pretty good if it just did all that - got everything right and polished. But there are a few gameplay elements that really shine in Dead Space, the biggest one being the zero-gravity areas. Moving and fighting in these areas could have gone horribly wrong, but thankfully they got it working well. You're wearing magnetic boots, so when you enter zero gravity areas, you stick to the floor. When you need to get somewhere that's not on the floor, you aim the left trigger to where you want to go and hit the Y button to jump across.

This makes for some fun, vertigo-twisting gameplay a-la Super Mario Galaxy, when suddenly up is down. Another exceptional gamplay aspect is the need to dismember many of your enemies to take them down. Straight shots to the chest may slow them down, but only by taking off an arm and a leg (much like game makers do to us with these SIXTY DOLLAR GAMES) will you finish them off.

There's a cool stasis ability which can be a livesaver when it freezes / slows down enemies, and a kinesis ability that's use is akin to the awesome gravity gun from Half Life 2. In fact, I've used it in similar manners, shooting explosive tanks at oncoming enemies with the same effect. Both of these abilities are used to solve puzzles as well as in combat.

The armored hero has a powerful melee option, swinging wildly the gun he is holding, in a forward and return arc. He's also got a thundering stomp ability, not that useful all the time, but fun to break open crates with and pulp up the blood-splattering corpses of downed enemies.

I've reached as far as a really tough boss fight at the end of Chapter 6 of Dead Space so far, and I'm having a good time with it. Dead Space is the first really good title of the holiday season this year, doing all the conventional stuff of survival horror really well (and polished), and then becoming exceptional with some great new gameplay elements thrown into the mix.

Wii Fit It Into Our Schedule When We Can

2008-10-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

I got the call at work, just as I was leaving. My wife, Monique, out shopping at a nearby Target store, sighted one of the rarest sights in the modern consumer jungle - a Wii Fit. Since its release in May, the Wii Fit package - which comes with the balance board and Wii Fit program disc - has been as elusive as the Wii itself in the wild. I had never seen one myself.

But this Target store is somewhat of an anomaly. It's one of the last holdouts in a consumer dead zone, an area of empty strip malls and closed stores near our apartment. Being built just one exit off of the freeway down from that doomed Target is another, newer Target store in a booming area of homes and stores that has supplanted the old one. All of this makes this Target less visited, and thus my wife saw not one, but two Wii Fits just sitting there for sale.

So she bought it, and we've been working out with it every day ever since. It measures your balance, weight, and BMI (body mass index or something like that, which means how much you weigh corresponding to your height), and then logs it so you can do day by day comparisons.

Designed in Japan, the Wii Fit has clearly been made - and I'm treading dangerously close to racial stereotypes here - for the body types found there, and not for the many shapes and sizes that might be found in our American melting pot. And it's also lacking any sense of tact when dealing with those weight variances. Step on the board and you'll get an "ohh!" from the board's onscreen avatar, which kind of comes across as "Ooooh! Even though I'm designed to handle up to 300 pounds, your 190 is really straining me, fatty."

It gets worse. The Wii Fit program, after measuring you each day, chides you for any increase at all, even when it's less than two pounds, which it states is generally the amount of weight that everybody gains or loses each day through regular eating. It categorizes anyone without the exact BMI required as "overweight" or even "obese".

It criticizes posture as well, and warns of dire consequences if you rely on one leg even slightly more than the other. Excuse my leg breaking accident 11 years ago, Nintendo. Sheesh. In addition, it gets all snippy if you don't exercise at the exact same time every day. Again, maybe life in Japan is more structured, I really don't know, but ours is a freaking circus, so we should be rewarded for stepping on the damn board every day at all, regardless of if it was an hour later than the previous day.

But wait, there's more. This morning, during my workout, the Wii Fit asked me if I'd noticed any problems with Monique's posture. It gave me four answers to choose from, and of course since she was standing there watching me work out I answered "looks good", as any husband who wants to live another ten minutes would. The question really took me off guard, though, and made me wonder if this insidious piece of plastic and circuitry was trying to start some shit between me and my wife. Hey Wii Fit - if you have any issues with my wife's posture, take it up with her and leave me the fuck out of it.

All that being said, Wii Fit is fun and yes, I can feel the burn. There are Yoga and Strength Training exercises which are the real meat and potatoes of working out, and there are Aerobics and Balance Games which are the dessert, and thus a lot more fun. There are more exercises for each category unlocked as you continue to work out each day, and it keeps and compares scores between each user, so Monique and I compete for the high score in each category.

So Wii Fit is good, and it will probably do what it's supposed to do, as long as we stick with it. The question is, will we? We're commited to do so, but if we go out of town or some emergency comes up, and we miss a day, I've got a feeling that the harsh taskmaster that is the Wii Fit program will be so snotty about it as to discourage any further attempt at commitment.

As always, time will tell.

Hail To The King Baby!

2008-09-24T20:11:00.000-07:00

Duke Nukem 3D came to the XBox 360 Live Arcade today, and hell yes I downloaded it, in case you were curious. The classic first-person shooter has been ported perfectly with all its charm and plays great. It's still a triumph of character and level design and still offers a vast inventory of items and weapons that were revolutionary at the time it was released.

Back in the day (the long-lost era referred to by historians as the 1990s), I didn't have a PC until 1998, so I got to play Duke Nukem 64, an altogether watered down version on the Nintendo 64. It was fun and kept the gameplay intact, but sadly left the strippers out.

Now I get to get achievement points (whoopity dooo!) for tipping the strippers, and enjoy the cool new features which have been added to this version. The most interesting of which is the ability to rewind the game after death back to any previous point in the level and pick up the playing from there.

There are online and multiplayer modes, and the ability to record, save, and send clips of the game play, too. I look forward to trying all of it out. This game, and all the other treats available on the XBox Live service, more than justify the monthly subscription fee and small additional fees (800 points for Duke 3D) for XBox Live Gold. Keep it coming, Micorsoft. Let's see Redneck Rampage next, please.

More Thoughts on Grand Theft Auto IV

2008-09-22T15:37:00.000-07:00

Of course, I love this game. Almost everyone does, and those who wrote about its greatness did so back in April when it came out. As usual, I'm behind the curve, but I do have some thoughts to share about life in Liberty City.

Everything I was hoping for is here - it's just a massive heap of content and things to do, and I can do them at my own pace, pushing the story forward when I feel like it, and messing with the breathtakingly detailed virtual world they've created when I don't feel like going on a mission or playing darts with Roman for the tenth time.

The missions have gotten more challenging without adding any real frustration to the game. If I fail one mission repeatedly, I can put it aside and do something else, and then come back to it in a few days and usually succeed. New weapons like the sniper rifle and new items like the cell phone camera have kept the missions fresh enough to avoid repetition, although a lot of them involve long chases through the streets of the city.

What has me pleasantly surprised about GTA IV is the story and the characters that have all unfolded along the way. Like those Phoenix Wright games, good characters can make a great game a masterpiece, and the writers behind this game have done an excellent job of making me care about a bunch of morally bankrupt sociopaths and their lives.

Nico's in it for the money, but he often shows a bizarre sense of honor along the way that's humorous and interesting. The decisions that the player makes along with Nico really build sympathy for the character, even as he's blasting a shotgun at the police or getting some back-alley fun from a prostitute. I guess I was expecting thuggish sleazery just for the shock value, but the game's creators really have a lot more going on here.

I expect to be playing GTA IV for the rest of the year, at least, and with more content coming for the game via XBox Live, perhaps beyond that. With the impressive schedule of fall videogame releases ahead, though, my time in Liberty City may be limited, but that's okay. I know Nico and the rest will be there waiting for me with more stuff to do than I have time for.

Milestones : Mattel's Dungeons and Dragons Handheld

2008-09-22T14:56:00.000-07:00

After playing Adventure on the Atari, I was hooked on games with a set quest and an ending, which were scarce in the Golden Age of Arcades where almost everything was a shooter or a maze chase. I was also at the time, and still am, a fan of portable gaming, but most of those were the same old song and dance - LED sports games or pared down versions of arcade games.

Imagine my delight, then, when Mattel put out a tiny LCD game version of Dungeons and Dragons. I saw it in either a game magazine or the JC Penney Christmas Catalog and knew I had to have it. I didn't know too much about it then, but had hoped for the best. On that Christmas morning in 1982, I hit the jackpot with the first fully contained portable adventure game.

It had much more depth than I had hoped for - three difficulty levels, randomly generated mazes, several items and obstacles, great audio effects used to enhance gameplay, and challenging exploration. Players carefully work their way through a 10 x 10 grid maze littered with pits, searching for first a magic arrow, and second, the dragon to shoot it at. In a possible unintended homage to Atari's Adventure, an annoying bat sometimes picks up the player and deposits him in a random room - sometimes right into a pit, ending the game if the player doesn't have a magic rope.

The elegance of the design of the credit-card sized game, no thicker than a magazine and controlled with three simple buttons, is awesome for its time. It runs on 2 A76 watch batteries, which they still manufacture to this day and sell everywhere. It has a demonstration mode that saves battery life, which is necessary since there is no off switch. Once the batteries are installed the game is powered and running.

Probably my favorite non-programmable handheld of all time, Mattel's Dungeons and Dragons is a technological masterpiece from 1982 that gave me my first taste of portable adventuring, and did it right in every way. I still break it out of its original box and go for a quick adventure in that dungeon every so often, and it's still quite challenging and fun.

Lifetime Achievement Points

2008-09-11T17:31:00.000-07:00

So I'm on XBox Live these days, as one can tell by the little thing on the sidebar of this blog which tracks what I'm playing as well as my "gamerscore", an accumulation of "achievement points" from every game I play (successfully) on the XBox 360. It's a way for gamers to compare just how much of thier lives they are throwing away on gaming, and has been described accurately elsewhere on the internet as "e-penis length".

What turns me off from the whole system is that it's just XBox exclusive. How can a young, adolescent, and "leet" Halo 3 player be a more "achieved" gamer than me, who has invested over thirty years in this hobby? It's ludicrous, and Microsoft should award points for past gaming experiences.

Here's a sampling of achievements that I have earned over the years but have yet to be added to my gamerscore by closed-minded Microsoft:

Beating my sister at Pong on Christmas Day so many times that she never played me again - 10G

Spending an entire week's lunch money after school on Monday playing Galaxian at my local bowling alley - 20G

Finding the "safe spot" on level three of K.C. Munchkin for the Odyssey 2 - 10G

Finding the hidden room and the designer's name in Adventure for the Atari VCS - 10G

Reaching the top of all four builings in the arcade game Crazy Climber - 25G

Sending in Kool - Aid points saved up over the summer to get a free copy of Kool-Aid Man for the Atari VCS - 50G

Actually playing through an entire game of The Great Wall Street Fortune Hunt on the Odyssey 2 with another human being - 25G

Getting a tip published in the "Tips From The Experts" section of Odyssey Adventure Magazine - 100G

Beating "Escape From The Mindmaster" on the Supercharged Atari VCS - 20G

Beating four of the five Scott Adams text adventures on the Commodore VIC 20 (including The Count) - 40G

Getting to the hidden area in Protector for the Commodore VIC 20 - 25G

Creating a working videogame for the Apple 2 computer as my final project in my high school computer class - 100G

Getting the Babel Fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy for the Commodore 64 - 42G

Beating Julian in a duel of swords in Nine Princes In Amber for the Commodore 64 (a text adventure sword fight!) - 25G

Mapping out The Bard's Tale for the Commodore 64 - 50G

Mapping out Sword of Kadash for the Commodore 64 - 100G

Beating Forbidden Forest for the Commodore 64 - 25G

Beating Military Madness for the Turbografx 16 - 50G

Mapping out the great tree in Faxanadu for the NES - 25G

Beating Super Star Wars : The Empire Strikes Back for the Super Nintendo - 100G

Mapping out Alien Vs. Predator for the Atari Jaguar - 100G

Finding and reporting to Nintendo a game-stopping dead end situation in The Legend of Zelda : Link's Awakening for the GameBoy - 1000G

Playerkilling over 100 landlubbers with my pirate character in Ultima Online - 25G

Discovering the Room Under the Lake in Ultima Online - 500G

Beta-testing Ultima Online : Third Dawn - 20G

Having an in-game item (The Admiral's Hearty Rum) named after my character in Ultima Online - 1000G

All the other games I've beaten over the years - 25000G

OK, Microsoft, you can add these to my gamerscore whenever you want. Thanks!

Ok, I'm Playing Grand Theft Auto IV Now

2008-08-28T17:38:00.000-07:00

After playing Bully : Scholarship Edition on the Wii earlier this year, I wanted another sandbox game. Now in possession of an XBox 360, there was really only one choice. So I'm in Liberty City now, walking through the streets that most of the gaming world passed through four months ago, in Grand Theft Auto IV.

I haven't seen a cityscape this amazing since I was in Paragon City playing City of Heroes. And all the sandbox - style content is a smorgasbord for an explorer like me. I'm really, really good at learning 3D game environments, but Liberty City is so vast that it will take me weeks to know just the first island like the back of my hand.

The missions and gameplay are just what I expected, but the most fun I've had so far is testing the limits of what Nico can do, or more accurately, cannot do. For example, I was giggling gleefully as Nico stole one of those airport golf carts that are used to haul luggage, and tore off into the city with it, police chasing after him angrily. While my attempts to get away all met with failure, it was fun seeing just how dogged the police chase was. The cops in Liberty City are certainly smarter than the ones in Bullworth Town.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about Grand Theft Auto IV later on, most of which was probably said four months ago in other people's blogs. Someday, I'll get a hit game at release and not be so far behind the curve, I hope.

Five Years Later : An Interview With The Ultima X : Odyssey Team

2008-08-21T03:54:00.000-07:00

Introduction

There have probably been more videogames that never made it past the development stage than were ever released. Heaps and mounds of design documents shredded, millions of lines of code lost or deleted, and the hopes and dreams of real people trying to bring thier ideas to other gamers dashed by forces beyond their control.

However, when a game series that defined a genre for much of the history of videogaming ends with its tenth installment lost to the dustbins of history, one wonders just what the hell went wrong. Such is the case of Ultima X : Odyssey, a game that was unveiled to the public five years ago today at a lavish and energetic press event, but cancelled less than a year later.

At the time of the cancellation, Electronic Arts issued the usual, cauterized press statement, claiming the same thing that was stated when an earlier Ultima - based MMO, UO2, was cancelled - that the decision was made to focus more attention on Ultima Online. Clearly, though, there was more to that story.

Since many of the UXO team's members were still either with EA at other divisions or out on the job market not wanting to cross any lines of professional courtesy by talking about the freshly-cancelled game so soon - or, even still, dealing with their own understandable disappointment about the project's cancellation - no one was willing to talk.

It's five years later, and the team has long since scattered across the country, and moved on to other jobs and challenges, so I wondered if maybe, just maybe, they were finally willing to talk about Ultima X : Odyssey and its unfortunate end. They were. I came up with fifteen questions and sent them out to some of the team and they were kind enough to answer, painting a picture of a time, merely five years ago, where events lead to the cancellation of Ultima X : Odyssey.

Rick "Stellerex" Hall was the Executive Producer of Ultima X : Odyssey, and is currently the Director of Production at Florida Interactive Entertainment Academy, in Orlando, and has written about his fifteen years in the game development business in a book titled Game Development Essentials: Online Game Development.

Jonathan "Calandryll" Hanna was the game's Lead Designer, and is currently moving back to Austin to "work with a start up".

Kevin "Jalek" Saffel was a senior programmer on UXO and is now the Chief Technology Officer of Heatwave Interactive, and cautions us that "none of my statements express the views and/or opinions of Heatwave Interactive, Inc." . That's fair.

Amy "Morgaine" Sage was a Writer and Community Coordinator for UXO and now works as the Marketing Director for Freedom Holdings, Inc. in Austin, Texas.

The Questions

1. When was Ultima X : Odyssey first conceived and when did work on the project begin?

Rick Hall : Originally, just after the UO2 project was cancelled (March 2001) and there were a bunch of layoffs at Origin, maybe 3 or 4 months after that, we started talking about making a "True 3D" version of UO. Over the course of the next few months, that changed into Ultima X Odyssey. If I remember correctly, that was roughly October of 2001 or so when it became "UXO," and that's when the first few developers started working on it.

Jonathan Hanna : I’m not really sure when the project was first conceived, but if I recall, work started some time in mid to late 2001. But really, that was mostly exploratory, checking out engines, early designs, etc. The project didn’t really get going until early 2002. Even then the team was very, very small. Maybe 8 people.

Kevin Saffel : A couple of us were tasked by Rick Hall (Executive Producer on UO) to start looking into the next version of UO. We started out as 2 of us programmers digging around and messing with the 3rd Dawn code to make it "cooler". We eventually realized that we didn't want to go down that path and started thinking about a new game. The prototyping was probably started in late 2001. As Rick pulled more people onto our prototype, UX:O began to sprout. Initial "real" development probably started mid to late 2002?

Amy Sage : This is several years back, and I don’t have my old Origin mails anymore to go back and pinpoint it, but I’d say probably late 2002 when the discussions really started. As far as when it was conceived, that’s something Rick Hall would need to answer, since it was his brainchild.

2. When did you join the UXO team and what was your job on the project?

Rick Hall : I was the Exec Producer for Ultima Online, and was the first person on the team for UXO. I held the same title on that project.

Jonathan Hanna : I started in Feb. 2002 and was the Lead Designer for most of the project.

Kevin Saffel : I was on the project before it was a project. There were 2 programmers playing around with ideas and eventually the other programmer left to look into other project possibilities. It was then just an artist (Jeremy Dombroski) and I playing around with Unreal to see what we could do. I was one of the senior programmers on the project. For all intents and purposes I was the lead client engineer (under Clark Janes) but never got (nor wanted) the title :)

Amy Sage : It actually wasn’t too long before the San Francisco event, I don’t think… I remember I was still on UO as late as June of 2003. Jon Hanna (UXO lead designer) and I were good friends, though, and played MMOGs together quite a bit, so even when I was still on UO, there was always discussions going on about game systems and where the design was going. When I joined, it was as a combination community person/writer. Part of the job including writing fiction (for example, where did Gargoyle females suddenly come from, and since when did Gargoyles have tails?). I enjoyed that part because I did a lot of research into Ultima lore back on U:IX, and actually conferred quite a bit back then with Herman Miller, the author of the Gargoyle language. For UXO, I also wrote a lot of in-game text, including editing quest dialogue and design docs, and writing stat and spell descriptions.

3. Considering the stated reason that Ultima Online 2 was cancelled - fear that it would split the UO playerbase - how was UXO approved for development?

Rick Hall : Honestly, I think it was a matter of timing. Consider this: When UO2 was cancelled, it was done by the EA.COM division in March 2001. In that same month, EA acquired Pogo. Within six months, Pogo had displaced the EA.Com people and was effectively running EA's online business. Pogo was a completely different set of people, with a completely different perspective. They saw things differently, and allowed UXO to be undertaken.

Jonathan Hanna : I can’t say for certain, but one of the original designs was more like a big 3D expansion to UO. It’s kind of hard to explain without going into a lot of detail, but your UXO character was heavily connected to your UO character and you’d get benefits to your UO character for playing UXO and vice-versa. The design was changed to a stand-alone product pretty early on though and everyone was on board with that.

Kevin Saffel : I really liked what UO2 could have been. However, it wasn't just killed because of fear of splitting the UO player-base. It had some problems and EA didn't feel it was going to be ready when they needed it to be.

Amy Sage : This is one of those I can’t really answer, since I wasn’t in on the meetings where it was pitched. But if I had to come up with a reason, it would be the focus of UXO on incorporating a more single-player experience into a multiplayer world, something that UO never really had.

4. UXO used the Unreal Warfare engine - how did that come about and how did you feel about that?

Rick Hall : We investigated quite a number of different engines, including Quake, Unreal, NetImmerse, Torque, Blueberry 3d, and the Crytek engine among others. Actually, we liked the Crytek engine the best, but it was prohibitively expensive at the time. Unreal was also a really strong choice. We liked the level editor, the price was right, the graphics capabilities were awesome, and Epic does an absolutely incredible job supporting those developers who use their engine. In the end, it was some interesting surgery making an FPS engine work with a MMOG, but we were pleased with the results.

Jonathan Hanna : The engine was picked before I joined the team. I was excited about it as it’s a great engine.

Kevin Saffel : Jeremy Dombroski brought the Warfare engine to our attention initially because his brother (Andy, the eventual Lead World Builder) had been working with it on other projects at another company. We had the Dawn model (from 3rd Dawn) running around throwing fireballs/freezing orcs and everyone began getting excited about the possibilities. We felt good about the Unreal engine; It has a great suite of tools that help you get content up and running very quickly. We felt we could build our own backend and use the power the engine and tools gave us to keep it cutting edge. We gave it a thumbs up to start doing actual technical design and getting server/framework programmers involved.

Amy Sage : I’m all for using already-proven technology… the less work you have to do from scratch, the more time you can put into making a good game. Remember I was also on Ultima Ascension, which was a shining example of the pain you can run into when making your own engine from scratch (by the time the game shipped, much of the code was already outdated and didn’t work well with the newest video cards). In addition, the time it took to work out engine-related problems was time not spent working on game performance and fine-tuning, which ultimately showed in the final product. So back to your question on Unreal… I can’t speak for Rick’s reasons on why he chose to go that route, but I think it was a fine choice.

5. Five years ago, on August 21, 2003, EA held a huge press event in San Francisco to introduce Ultima X : Odyssey to the world. What are your recollections of that event and how the game was received?

Rick Hall : I remember the event vividly. :) Actually, I still have a video of the event to this day on my hard drive. I had a lot of fun. I think the fans really enjoyed it, and if all of the video we collected was any indication, I have to believe the game was received quite well. To this day, I think that was the absolute best way to unveil a MMOG to the world: Instead of talking to the press first, go straight to the players. Let a large gathering of veteran MMOG-ers see what you've got and lay their hands on it, and you'll have a good idea of your chances when you go live.

Jonathan Hanna : I remember being really nervous. We were building something that had almost no resemblance to UO. It was a lot more like the single player games, focused on combat, questing, etc. I wasn’t sure if people would like it. But the response from the press and the players was overwhelmingly positive. So by the end of the event, I was thrilled.

Kevin Saffel : It was surreal. The event was put together really well by Debby Sue Wolfcale and her team. I really enjoyed meeting all the players and seeing their excitement for the game we'd worked so hard on. I remember watching the PvP competition videos and seeing our first class imbalance: The mage casting fireballs would own everyone, even the beloved alchemist! All in all the developers and the players had a great time and I think everyone was looking forward to seeing the game go live.

Amy Sage : That event was awesome. I’d been involved in the game just long enough to really get excited about the design and the innovative systems, and I was truly excited to see the anticipation from the fans. They were all looking forward to it, and it was a thrill to be part of the team.

6. At the time of the event, was there any hint that EA would be closing the Austin studio and attempting to relocate the team to San Francisco?

Rick Hall : No. At that time, I know for a fact that EA wasn't even considering that possibility.

Jonathan Hanna : Not really, although it’s something we talked about almost every year I was at OSI. When it happened, it was surprising, but not shocking.

Kevin Saffel : None at all. In fact, the people that were overseeing UX:O from EA in California were really excited for us and were happy with the reception by the players.

Amy Sage : Not that I had heard, no.

7. When did word first reach the UXO and UO development teams about the closing of Origin's Austin studio and the relocation of those teams to San Francisco?

Rick Hall : It was only a few months before they actually closed the doors. I found out about a week before the rest of the studio. I think it was around mid-February of 2004. They told the rest of the studio a week later that they'd be closing the doors in April and trying to relocate most of the team to San Francisco to complete UXO.

Jonathan Hanna : I want to say in Feb 2004. Don’t recall the exact date.

Kevin Saffel : It started out as a rumor maybe 2 weeks before the actual announcement. It really put a damper on the team's spirit. Eventually, they announced it to us that they were shutting down the studio and moving select people to California. It was very sad to watch as the company slowly disintegrated over the next few weeks.

Amy Sage : Official word? The day before it happened in Feb. of ‘04. There had been a few uneasy signs though, for about a week… someone’s temporary contract not getting renewed when we thought it would, a couple strange design documents found in a shared folder, a cessation of meetings shortly before, all combined with the fact that a part of the design had just been handed to a team from California a couple weeks before. I definitely had the feeling a major shift was coming for UXO, but until I got the official word, I didn’t know it was the whole studio. That news was rough - definitely one of those ‘knock the wind out of you’ moments, since I‘d been there for 6 years.

8. What was your reaction to that announcement - did you even consider the move?

Rick Hall : Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. No, I didn't consider moving to San Francisco. Mostly, that was because I was absolutely positive that almost no one else would go either. People who live in Austin really love it, and there are plenty of other game companies. Everyone would have preferred to finish the game, but it wasn't worth it to them to move a thousand miles away and double their cost of living.

Jonathan Hanna : I was disappointed obviously, and to some degree still am, but at this point I can understand the decision given the landscape at the time. I never really considered the move. Most didn’t.

Kevin Saffel : Honestly, I was shocked. I loved working at Origin and on UO/UX:O so much that it was a HUGE emotional blow to me. I did seriously consider the move to California. The offer was great and my fiancée (now my wife) and I talked about it at length. In the end, we realized that we had too many ties to Texas and Austin and just couldn't bring ourselves to leave.

Amy Sage : We’d just watched Westwood get shut down, and then Maxis, so the writing was definitely on the wall. In boldface, and underlined. The option of moving was never really there for me, though… my husband at the time was working on a new project at NCSoft, and there was a lot of promise there, so there was no way we were picking up and moving to California.

9. While Ultima X : Odyssey wasn't officially cancelled until June 30, 2004, was development of the game pretty much over when most of the team decided to leave EA earlier in the year?

Rick Hall : Yes. Although EA extended offers to 35 members of the Austin dev team to move to San Francisco, only 2 artists and 2 level builders accepted their offers. EA tried to find people in California to finish the project, but that was close to impossible. It was a huge project, and there would have been no one to get new people ramped up. Very little was done with the game between April 2004 and the end of June.

Jonathan Hanna : I wouldn’t say that. Most of the team didn’t make the move so obviously that slowed things down, but the game was handed over to a new team and there was a transition period. People were working on it after we all left.

Kevin Saffel : No, the game was a few months from beta. We were working very hard to ensure it was ready for beta so that everyone could enjoy testing it and really just get into load-testing and such from a production/development standpoint.

Amy Sage : This is one I really can’t answer, since after the studio closed, I changed my focus to other things, like finishing my college degree. Whatever happened in California beyond that point was pretty much out of my circle.

10. Why was Ultima X : Odyssey cancelled? We know the official reason given, of course, but after so much time, money, talent, and even publicity was put into it, it seems so unbelievable that EA was willing to just drop it and take the loss.

Rick Hall : EA had no desire to drop the project. Remember, they made offers to most of the dev team to try to relocate them to California. They absolutely wanted to finish the game. The whole issue was driven by investor relations. Wall Street demands efficiency. At the time, EA had studios all over the world and each studio requires money to operate. It was making EA less efficient than it could have been. Investor pressure caused EA to attempt to consolidate their satellite studios into "hubs".

That's one of the reasons why Westwood was shut down, and many of those developers moved to EA's San Francisco office. Shortly thereafter, EA attempted further consolidation with both Maxis and the Origin studio. I think the EA execs truly expected a higher percentage of people to accept their offers to relocate the Austin guys to San Francisco. After all, they had success in Las Vegas with Westwood (around 85% accepted the relocation offers), and EA expected to repeat that success with Origin.

Unfortunately, Las Vegas is very different than Austin. There aren't many game developers in Las Vegas, so the Westwood guys were going to have to move anyway. They had no other viable options, so they just took up EA's relocation offers out of convenience. In Austin, there were 20 other game developers right there in town, and practically everyone in Austin knows everyone else. It wasn't hard for a lot of people to find jobs right there. The end result was definitely not what EA expected. The UXO project died simply because of logistics, not because EA wanted to shut it down.

At Origin, we were just casualties of war in business. I don't blame EA. I understand why they did what they did, and it makes business sense. Even commenting about the amount of money that was spent on UXO is a bit misleading. UXO cost around $10 million over 2 years when it was cancelled. In the face of EA's $3 billion annual budget, that's really not even a blip on the radar.

Jonathan Hanna : No idea really. It was 4 or 5 months after I left, and I’ve heard lots of different reasons, but never got enough information to determine which was the most accurate. I’m sure the original team not making the move contributed to that, but there were probably other factors.

Kevin Saffel : I honestly believe they had no intention on killing it at the time Origin was shut down. EA thought about 80% of the people (from Austin) that were offered the move to California would go. There were a handful of developers out in California that had been helping the Austin team for a little while. However, with just 2 people (artist and world builder) from the Austin UX:O team moving to California, there really wasn’t enough people to continue developing the game. None of the engineers that designed the technical pieces of the game and none of the designers went. Eventually most of the programmers in California moved projects or left EA leaving very few people on the UX:O team. They attempted to revive it as a single player game, but, EA eventually decided that was a bad idea (wouldn't be a big enough game) and it was finally killed.

Amy Sage : Again… I wish I knew. I can’t say it was a major surprise after the recent cancellations of Earth and Beyond, Motor City Online, and UO2, but as for the real reasons, those were meetings I wasn’t in on.

11. Did the impending release of (and unbelievable hype for) World of Warcraft affect the development of UXO or its cancellation?

Rick Hall : Not at all.

Jonathan Hanna : No, I don’t think so. It definitely didn’t affect our development although obviously we were paying attention to them. As far as UXO’s cancellation, I’ve never heard WoW mentioned specifically as a reason.

Kevin Saffel : It did put some pressure on us to figure out when UX:O should be released. There were beliefs that it should be released prior to WoW to embed our player-base into the game so we wouldn't lose them. There were concerns that when WoW was out, that you'd have a rough time pulling people from it if you waited too long. However, from what I knew internally, none of that was a deciding factor to kill UX:O.

Amy Sage : The development, not necessarily. We paid attention to what they released about their design for sure, but I honestly don’t think they influenced our design all that much. The cancellation? Entirely possible. EA already had one swords-and-sorcery game turning a profit (Ultima Online), and WoW was looking to be bigger by the day. Not to mention Blizzard has a well-earned reputation for releasing great games, so they had to have known it would be major competition.

12. Do you believe that, if UXO had been finished and released as originally planned, it would have been successful?

Rick Hall : I believe UXO would have been successful, but I don't hold any illusions that it would have reached 10 million subscribers, like W.O.W. Keep in mind, before W.O.W. a successful MMOG was anything over 200,000 subscribers. I think UXO would probably have reached somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 subs. It would have been a good, solid, successful business, but nothing like the runaway success of W.O.W. It's important to understand here that UXO was running on a budget that was a tiny fraction of the development costs of W.O.W., and our development schedule was somewhere around 1/3rd the duration. When you spend a lot less time and money developing a game, it's reasonable to assume you'll get less out of it when it hits the shelves.

Jonathan Hanna : Yes, but that’s a tricky question to answer. If we had made the new ship date, we would have run smack into WoW’s launch. It think it would have been very difficult to compete with them even with UXO’s unique designs. UXO was a relatively low budget title though, so I think it would have been profitable and would have found a base from which to grow.

Kevin Saffel : I do. It was still a little rough around the edges but there were a LOT of great things in the game. Item leveling, ascension, spell system, cutting edge art and many others. I was actually looking forward to playing it myself. I believe it would have really hooked old Ultima fans because it really pushed hard on what made Ultima what it was.

Amy Sage : Part of that might have depended on whether we got it out before World of Warcraft, since people tend to stick with a good game once they start it, and we knew that coming out before them, and having a good and sticky initial experience, would be a major plus. Even if we had come out after them though, I do think we had a good chance. Our goals were really sound… solid game performance, wide variety of environments and characters, guided quests and stories that led you into the game world at a steady pace, but yet enough to see and explore to keep you entertained for a really long time.

13. What did you take away, or chalk up to experience, from your time working on UXO - both in terms of game design and how the games business works?

Rick Hall : That's a longer answer than I can provide here. I wound up publishing a book earlier this year on MMOG development, and it contains a lot of what I learned on the UXO project, both from the design perspective and the business.

Jonathan Hanna : Mostly that you should always remember this is a business. People will make decisions you don’t agree with and you can’t take it personally.

Kevin Saffel : 1) Just because it's realistic, doesn't mean it's fun.
2) Leave time to iterate on design. We went through 7 or 8 iterations of combat (in code) before it felt fun. It's worth it.
3) Any game can be cancelled any time for any reason.
4) Beta for MMOs is as much of a marketing tool as it is a development tool.
Don't EVER forget it.

Amy Sage : I came away with a healthy appreciation for being a hardcore gamer who happens to be female, since as one of only a few female gamers on the team, I had the opportunity to pipe in with advice to keep the audience wider, or the occasional “No way, those breasts are WAY too big.” (Yeah, I know, the guys are cursing my name now.) As far as the game business in general… it didn’t really change much. In the six years I’d spent at Origin, I’d watched major layoffs almost every spring. I’d seen two entire teams laid off practically out from under me, in U:IX and UO2. I’d seen half a dozen games in development get cancelled, and several other EA studios consolidated before ours. UXO was really no different in terms of how the game industry works… it changes fast, and it’s hard to really feel a sense of security. I’d go back into it in a second, though, as the ability to be creative and be around creative people is something really special.

14. At the event where Ultima X : Odyssey was unveiled, the team seemed energetic, confident, and enthusiastic about the game - is that common among development teams in your experience?

Rick Hall : I think we had a pretty tight team, but that's not exactly rare in game development. We all liked working together and loved what we were working on. If I had to guess in my experience how often that happens, I'd say maybe 10% - 20% of the projects I've been associated with have had that level of positive feel on the team.

Jonathan Hanna : Yea it is, but this team was especially so. It really was a great team.

Kevin Saffel : Usually the excitement is in the beginning and then again in the very end when you're about to ship. The UX:O team seemed to carry the excitement through most of the development. I do believe, however, that the event did help to get the team even more jazzed about UX:O. Seeing it up in lights and watching the excitement on the players' faces was great for the team.

Amy Sage : I think so, yes, when the team feels good about the game, and we did.

15. Do you have any other thoughts or experiences about working on Ultima X : Odyssey that you'd like to share on the fifth anniversary of the game's unveiling?

Rick Hall : There are tons of old war stories I have from those days, and I always enjoy telling them. I think if there's one thing I should add it's that I bear EA no ill will over the whole thing. It was very disappointing, but it made a kind of business sense. And since I no longer work for EA, I have no reason to be a "company man" and spin things to make them look better. I responded to your questions the way I really feel about it all. It was a great experience. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. It was disappointing how it ended, but these things happen.

Jonathan Hanna : It’s one of those times in my life that I will always remember fondly. My entire time at OSI, even before UXO, will always be like that. I am sure I’ll get to work with some of those guys and gals again. Hopefully anyway. They were a fantastic group of people who despite a lot of obstacles, built something very special, even if most games will never see it.

Kevin Saffel : I really wish it would have hit the world. I would have loved to talk to players about it and see how people received the game. It was a bit different than anything out at the time and still would be. There is still part of me that misses Origin and everyone that worked there on UX:O and other projects. I would like to see EA possibly try to reboot it and see if they could kick-start the Ultima franchise again.

Amy Sage : I’m just bummed I never got to play a Gargoyle. Thanks for contacting me, and I look forward to seeing your story. :)

Conclusion

And now you know the rest of the story (my apologies to Paul Harvey, but I've always wanted to say that). Ultima X : Odyssey, set to be the tenth installment in the classic Ultima series, a sequel to Ultima Online, and a true 3D Ultima MMO all at the same time, was unveiled to the gaming public five years ago today.

Less than a year later, the game was cancelled by EA, but not necessarily due to some cold, number-crunching executive in a shadowy office, as many of us had always assumed. Sure, the economic realities of the business end of game making were a factor, but revealed in the answers above was an even stronger force at work.

Austin, Texas, must be one hell of a great city. I mean, I've heard that before, but damn. Five years ago EA flew me to San Francisco, which, due to my own economic realities, was a first for me, and I fell in love with that place the second I got off the plane. Even with the cost of living factored in, to deny oneself a chance to live and work there means that life in Austin is damn good, and fosters some serious loyalty.

So, no one's to blame here, five years later. EA did what they had to do, with the full intention to finish and release Ultima X : Odyssey. Their miscalculation about the UXO team's loyalty to their home and indeed, to each other, meant the game was doomed the second the decision was made to close Origin down in Austin.

But we all lost that day. EA, the UXO team, and those of us who were very much looking forward to playing it. One of the greatest game series of all time, which started back in the fall of 1980 with Ultima I and defined the role-playing game genre for much of its run, ended with the one game that just might have brought it back to its glory. It certainly had me excited about the future of Ultima again.

My warmest thanks to Rick Hall, Jonathan Hanna, Kevin Saffel, and Amy Sage for taking the time to answer my questions about Ultima X : Odyssey and for, at long last, giving many of us closure on the events of that time.

To them and everyone else on the team, and those who planned and ran that incredible event five years ago, you have the gratitude of at least one would - be Ultima X : Odyssey player, on this, the five year anniversary of the event. Alucinor awaits the brave...let virtue be your guide.

Five Years Ago Today : The EA-X Event

2008-08-21T02:58:00.000-07:00

On August 21, 2003, game maker Electronic Arts invited over a hundred people from the gaming community to San Francisco, all expenses paid, to unveil Ultima X : Odyssey to the world. I've written about that day extensively, so rather than rehash every little detail about it, I have decided to commemorate that day five years ago with embedded movies.

First, there was the email inviting us to go to the event. It contained a link to this flash movie, after which a registration page would appear. That page is long gone, but the movie lives on.

At the event, when we walked into the great hall at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, were were greeted with this movie:

Later, EA released a movie highlighting the event itself:

And, a video was released of a fly-through of the game's environments, accompanied by that epic music score:

Finally, here's the movie I made a few years back as a tribute to that game and event:

And if you're looking to find out even more about what an incredible game Ultima X: Odyssey could have been, look no further than the extensive UXO Stratics Archive, which they've been kind enough to keep alive on the net all these years.

On this day, all Ultima fans should look back with fond rememberance for Ultima X : Odyssey and all that it could have been.

BioShock....Meh.

2008-08-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

After all the praise lauded on the game, the great reviews, and several friends telling me how amazing it was, I was looking forward to playing BioShock once I got the XBox 360. A co-worker loaned me his copy awhile back, but it sat idle while I fought my way through all the Half-Life 2 episodes on the Orange Box (which, I must say, were just incredible).

So I started on BioShock recently, and, well, I'm not really enjoying it that much. And I just can't really put my finger on it. The story, characters, and retro-design environments are all pretty cool. The mix of weapons and super-powers (called plasmids) are fun. So what don't I like?

Death in the game is just a very minor inconvenience, and nothing resets when you die. Instead, you are revived in the nearest Vita-Chamber booth, with everything you had on you when you died, and yourself at half health. This means you can go right back to what you were fighting and keep hammering away at it, dying and returning repeatedly until it's dead. I literally have had a few of those "Big Daddy" guys right outside the Vita-Chamber, killing me seconds after leaving it but not before I got a few shots in.

Maybe it's the overly-noir environments which hide any graphic details of those crazed "splicers" that attack me wherever I go. Every place in the game is dark and shadowy, and while what lighting there is never fails to impress in creating those shadows, the cumulative effect is just an irritating hodgepodge of nooks and crannies that often make it hard to see enemies and objects in the morass.

Or perhaps it's just that, if I wanted to play Pipe Dream again, I'd break out my Game Boy version. Dozens of different objects in BioShock can be hacked, from vending machines to security cameras, by playing a mini-game that is, quite simply, Pipe Dream. While certain powers can assist in this so-called hacking, or shortcut it altogether, I've still ended up playing more Pipe Dream than I have in years.

BioShock is nonetheless a decent game, but for me personally - and I admit my gaming tastes are a little out there - It's just not living up to the hype. I've made it to the area called Arcadia, though, and will probably finish it soon. Maybe the ending will make me a believer.

My Evolving Videogaming Setup

2008-08-06T15:37:00.000-07:00

I've done some digging through old photographs and come up with this gallery of various videogame setups I've had over the years. Enjoy!

1983

I was a junior in high school, and in my room I had my Odyssey 2 set up. Behind the games I had for the system was my collection of Electronic Games magazines. To the right I kept my handhelds and other gadgets, including a TEAMMATE Game Computer, a primitive but fun little toy, and below that I had an original Magnavox Odyssey, acquired from a friend of the family, that unfortunately didn't work.

1994

At the height of the 16-bit era, I had four systems hooked up in my living room. Below the TV was the Turbografx 16 and the NES, and to the right I had the Super Nintendo and the Sega Genesis. I also had the Sega Master System converter for the Genesis and some Master System games.

On the other side of the room from all that, I kept my portable systems, including a GameBoy, an Atari Lynx, a TurboExpress (which rocked), and a Sega Game Gear. Not pictured and set up in my spare bedroom was my Commodore 64 and the vast library of games I had built for it.

2004

At this point, I wanted to have as many systems from my immense collection of games hooked up a the same time. Below the TV are my Playstation, SNES, Gamecube, and Nintendo 64. Wires leading forward from that setup went under a throw rug to my coffee table, where I had the Atari 2600, Odyssey 2, and NES all hooked up. It was quite a mess, but looked impressive.

Also in my living room were my portables - with my fledgling Game Boy Advance collection - and stand-alones, as well as two Vectrex units (what's the plural of Vectrex, anyway? Vectrexes? Vectrices?), and a Tempest arcade game, which I never could get fully functional. The sound and controls were fine, but the screen was distorted. I sold it off, as well as most of the games pictured here, during my eBay purge that started in 2005. So 2004 was my last hurrah for batshit crazy-ass videogame collecting.

And finally, in my bedroom in 2004, were my Commodore 64 and PC game libraries. As I reported last year, the Commodore 64 stuff was also - quite tragically - eBayed off too. It was like cutting out a piece of my own soul, but at the time the market was hot for C64, and it helped pay for my wedding.

2008

Today, accompanying our new 32-inch flatscreen TV, my wife and I have an XBox 360, a Wii, a Gamecube, and a PS2, along with their respective game libraries. Also on the shelf with those games is our collection of Nintendo DS, GameBoy Advance, GameBoy Color, and GameBoy games.

In our office, I have the Odyssey 2 set up, which I showcased in a blog entry last year, as well as the PC, the twin Vectrex units, and some stand-alones.

I wish I had taken more pictures over the years of my gaming setups as they evolved. But life moves fast, and with so many great systems and games coming and going over the decades, it's not always easy to hit pause and reflect on what you've got.

The Orange Box

2008-07-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

While considering the purchase of an XBox 360, I was thinking about what games to get for it right off the bat. Most of them, it seems, were releases from last fall. Ahead of all of them, though, on my list of most wanted games, was The Orange Box. Something inside told me that this package of three games - Half Life 2, Portal, and Team Fortress 2 - would have a huge amount of play time and thus "bang for the buck". I was right, and I'm sure glad and grateful that my co-workers who gave me this generous gift also included this game.

Portal I dove into right away. At first, I didn't get it. There was a chasm I had to cross and I couldn't make the jump. It took me awhile before I realized that, DUH, I cold make a portal opening over on the wall across the chasm. Another DUH moment came after I was chasing down what seemed to be another person in the test chamber with me, who was always one step ahead of me running into a portal of their own, when I realized that it was actually me.

The joy of Portal is one often universal to a good videogame. It's in learning the rules of the universe the game's designers have set up and applying them within the game. In Portal, it's a strange universe indeed, and figuring your way through the test chambers using the tools you're given is an absolute mind-exercising challenge of the highest degree. It was over too soon, but word from the recent E3 expo is that more Portal is on the way.

Team Fortress 2 is an online game that I've only dabbled with so far, but it's been fun. It seems more cartoony and thus more casual than most online games I've tried, but to be honest I haven't yet put the time I need to into this third of the Orange Box.

Half-Life 2 is just plain amazing. I feel comfortable giving away spoilers ahead because the PC version has been out for years, and this console version since last fall. At first, I thought the game was sort of drab. I had no idea of the plot, I was placed in a dystopian police-state city with a crowbar and told to suck it up.

It took awhile before the pace picked up and I got some better weapons, and got to some new environments. I even got a few hints of plot from the NPCs I encountered, making the game a little more interesting. As I progressed, I got to tool around in a swamp boat, got a really cool gravity gun, and fought all sorts of weirdness in the form of facehugger-controlled zombies and the like.

The best sequence so far in Half-Life 2 came yesterday when I got to ride up the coast in a dune buggy. It was a long road, stopping at remote houses to take out enemies and search for supplies. At several points in my journey I had to use the gravity gun to clear the road of wrecked cars, cackling gleefully as I sent them flying over the guardrail, off the cliff, and into the water below. Another stop along the way was at an enormous suspension bridge, where I had to climb along the girders on the underside of the bridge, and back again, to unlock passage of the top of it. The heights were dizzying.

At the end of yesterday's session of Half-Life 2, I had a new toy which allows me to tame and control a small squad of ant lion bugs and use them to take out enemies. It's been a long game so far, and the best part of it is that the Orange Box also contains Half-Life 2 Episode 1 and Half-Life 2 Episode 2 as well. I can't even imagine what kind of surprises are in store for me in those games.

The Orange Box was certainly the bargain I had hoped it would be - It may be months before I close that box and move on to something else, because the content within is absolutely fun and challenging.

A Quarter Century of Personal Personal Computing

2008-07-15T17:42:00.000-07:00

Last Friday, July 11, an important personal anniversary passed, and of course I didn't have time to blog about it then. I'm making the time now. On that date in 1983, I convinced my parents to buy me a computer. I was this close to talking them into a Commodore 64, but the high price point (at that time) scared them away, and I got a Commodore VIC 20 instead. It was still a win.

On that day twenty-five years ago, I entered a new gaming arena as well as a new place where computers were for far more than gaming. On the VIC, I did some minor BASIC programming, messed around with an art program, kept little journals of what I was doing, and just had fun.

Of course, there were some great games, too. Within a few months I was playing arcade games like Gorf and Omega Race, as well as complex games like Crush, Crumble, and Chomp (a movie-monster game). The VIC was approaching its waning days as its sibling, the Commodore 64, was growing in popularity and lowering its price. Two years later, I would have one.

Although I've come and gone again and again from computer gaming over the years, it's always been a great platform in every era. And those other applications that the VIC gave me a taste of have all blossomed into what we all know and take for granted with computers these days. In fact, it's impossible to imagine life without a computer hooked up in my home. And for me, it all started with the amazing little Commodore VIC 20 just over twenty five years ago.

I Should Be Doing A Lot More Blogging

2008-07-15T17:33:00.000-07:00

I really should spend a little time to catch up on what I'm playing, but time is now the most precious commodity I have. Working two jobs, still dealing with post-wedding stuff - like the two days I spent taking apart and rebuilding our living room entertainment center and bedroom entertainment center to accomodate the new hi-def TV that Monique's brother got us as a wedding present - and just being awestruck by the XBox 360 and XBox Live service and all its glory, it's taking up every free minute I have.

I could go on about Bioshock, which a co-worker loaned me last weekend, and its amazing style and play mechanics, but I have no time. I still have stuff to say about Portal, Half Life 2, and Call of Duty 4. And the demo of Too Human I downloaded and played last night.

And E3 is taking place right now, too. Microsoft made a huge splash last night and is looking strong again this fall. Nintendo has, from what I could skim from today's headlines, nothing at all that interests me this fall. Is this the end of my interest in the Wii? I could write about that, too.

Maybe this Sunday, I'll find some time.

The Best Day Of My Life

2008-07-06T19:22:00.003-07:00

...was June 28, 2008. Over a week ago. I'm back, but still very busy with post-wedding stuff. More gaming articles later.

On The Road With The DS Web Browser

2008-06-30T01:38:00.000-07:00

My new wife and I are sitting here at the Columbus airport, waiting for our honeymoon flight out of here at 5:45 AM. I thought it would be a good time to dust off the Nintendo DS Opera Internet Browser and take it for a quick blogging test drive.

So far, so good. I was relatively quickly able to establish a connection with the airport's Wi - Fi hotspot, and then with blogger. It was a bit sluggish logging on at first, but has functioned well since I got in.

I'm even getting proficient with this tiny touchscreen keyboard and am buzzing along now. It's almost boarding time, though, so I need to see if I can publish this now. More entries may follow later if I have the time.

It's my honeymoon after all.

My Last Post As A Bachelor

2008-06-28T05:00:00.000-07:00

In three hours, I am getting married. After the wedding reception, it's honeymoon time. So it may be awhile before I post again.

I'd like to go into length about how I beat Call of Duty 4 on the Recruit setting (easy), and how amazing every aspect of that game was - especially the story. I can't recall another first person shooter with such a gripping storyline. I just don't have the time right now.

And Portal - wow - I could go on forever about that one. Such a refreshingly original game, with mind-bending puzzles and the best 3D platforming gameplay since Super Mario Galaxy, Portal was one of those games that, once I got it and got into it, I played every free moment over the last few days until I beat it, too. The ending was just epic and left me wanting more. I could easily ramble on a very long time about how good Portal is.

But I have to go put on my tux and get married now. Some things are just more important than playing videogames, and far more important that blogging about videogames. If anyone's still reading - see you in a week or two.

Best Bachelor Party Ever

2008-06-19T17:41:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday night, after working both jobs on Friday and Saturday, my best man for my upcoming wedding decides that it was a good night for my bachelor party. Exhausted, and with little food in my belly, I had no choice but to go along with that plan - all my friends work insane hours and have complex lives, so it was really the only chance before the wedding to do this.

We all assembled at the first bar we would be drinking at. When my friends Jared and Jeff (who are also my bosses at my main job) joined us, they were carrying a large bag. Inside the bag was an XBox 360 Pro console, The Orange Box, and an extra controller. I about crapped my pants. My awesome friends and co-workers all pitched in, over the last year or so it seems, to get me the XBox 360 as a wedding present. They decided to give it to me at the bachelor party so I could try it out before the wedding and honeymoon.

Is that cool or what?

I was so horribly hung over on Sunday following the party that it wasn't until 8 PM that evening that I hooked the console up. I didn't get to play anything on it except about a 10 minute session of Half-Life 2. On Monday, I was still hurting, and also had a lot of other things to do, but I did manage to swing by Gamestop and pick up Call of Duty 4 for me, and World Series of Poker Battle for the Bracelets for Monique. Yes, in spite of years of saying that she'd never play it (just as she did with the Wii), my bride-to-be wanted that poker game so she could play her best friend in online poker.

I also on Monday got a long ethernet cable and hooked up to X-Box live. I downloaded a demo of Battlefield : Bad Company and played a little bit of that, as well as more Half Life 2. I got my first achievment by throwing a soda can at a fascist cop in that game.

Later in the week, I managed a few morning sessions of Call of Duty 4, and have just been blown away by both the action and the story. I got one online session of Team Fortress 2 in as well, mostly to see what it's like to play with a headset on. Very cool, I must say.

As the wedding approaches next week I'm sure I'll have even less time to play, much less blog about it. I'll catch up after the honeymoon, though. See you all on the other side!

It's About Time, Nintendo

2008-06-10T15:40:00.001-07:00

Nintendo has the worlds's most popular current generation console and the world's most popular handheld system. Both of them have had, since their releases, Wi-Fi capabilities. A few games on each system actually utilize it, too.

Now comes the breakthrough that should have been in place, as part of a larger and much more ambitious online plan, since these systems got launched. Today, I was able to wirelessly download demos of DS games through the Wii's Nintendo Channel. I played Arkanoid DS and Crosswords DS. It really worked.

It's a shame Nintendo is so sheepish about online play. They could be very successful with it if they were just a little - no, not a little, a whole lot of aggressively more ambitious about all of it.

Smash Brothers Brawl and Mario Kart Wii were good starts, as is this development for DS owners, but competitors are already in the deep end of the online pool while Nintendo is still sticking its toes in the water to see how cold it is. I just want to run up behind them and push them in sometimes.