pardon the cobwebs

I would say that there's no excuse for the absence of posting here over the last month, but that's not entirely true - there are several valid excuses I could come up with, and I'm sure I could make up a bunch as well. 

But here's the deal:  the last entry here talks about my failure at Starcraft 2.  Since then, here's what I've played:

• Madden 11.  I've always been one of those long-embittered 2KSports football fans who hated Madden and EA and everything it stood for.  But Madden won, of course, and if you have a serious jones for videogame football, it's Madden or bust.  And, as it happened, I started getting inexplicably excited for football season to start, and this year's Madden got good reviews, and I had some credit on Amazon that was burning a hole in my virtual wallet, and so there it is.  I've played about 10 or 11 games in my Franchise, which is set on Rookie difficulty, mostly so that I could get all the Achievements I cared to get as quickly as possible.  FUN FACT:  It is almost impossible to get the "Return 2 kicks for TDs with the same guy" Achievement on Rookie difficulty, because the opposing team is so terrible that they almost always go 4 and out, and you're lucky if you get to return just one kick - the one that leads off a half.
   
• Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light.  It's pretty good for what it is, and I imagine it would be a ton of fun if the online co-op ever got turned on.  Unfortunately, I think I've played all I'm ever going to play of this one, because now that Halo Reach is out I'm not sure that anyone will care enough to go back to this. 
  
• Mafia 2.  I actually did prepare a blog post for this; I had taken a sick day right after it arrived from Gamefly and accidentally/inadvertently finished the whole game in about 10 hours.  Here's what I can salvage:

Sometimes you can tell, just from the first 5 minutes of play, if a game was cared about in development.  After all, in today's ADD world, where developers have the balls to charge you to participate in a "beta", 5 minutes might just be all you get, and so it's probably a good idea to put your best foot forward (while still keeping the big guns for later in the experience).  Sometimes it's painfully obvious - the frame rate might be shitty, or the controls might be clunky and unresponsive.  Or, perhaps, it's just that certain areas of the game received more attention than others - sure, things explode pretty good, but the dialog and the voice acting both feel like first drafts; or, the driving model is responsive, but the combat sucks.

Mafia 2 was cared about.

But that doesn't make it a great game.

I was out sick yesterday, and I convalesced by playing the entirety of Mafia 2 (and, also, something else that I am not at liberty to discuss, wink wink nudge nudge).  And when I was going to sleep, I started thinking about how I would write about it, and I had this really well-written opening paragraph all set out, which was going to reference both this Joystiq article about how venerable games industry analyst Michael Pachter thought that Mafia 2 would probably be unprofitable, and this very well-written Rock Paper Shotgun review, which (among other things) made the salient observation that comparing Mafia 2 to GTA4 totally misses the point, and how Mafia 2 really needs to be compared to Mafia 1.

•  Anyway, yeah, there wasn't much to talk about after I finished Mafia 2.  It is a bland experience in an otherwise beautiful world.
  
• Professor Layton & the Unwound Future.  This just arrived in the mail on Monday, and... it really bums me out that I don't like these games anymore.  And the reason why I don't like these games anymore is because the puzzles, i.e. the reason why this game exists in the first place, have a tendency to be poorly written.  They can be unfairly difficult.  Or, most egregiously, they can only be solved with a walkthrough, and even then, the explanation for a puzzle's solution is obtuse or unclear.  The story is interesting, though, at least.
   
• Mass Effect 2: Shadow Broker DLC.  This is kind of a big deal, if you're a Mass Effect nerd.  The nuts and bolts of the DLC are pretty much just more combat, with a cool little vehicular chase scene (with the requisite shitty controls); so in that regard it's nothing special.  But from a story perspective... wow.  The ending of the DLC seems to be a pretty big deal, in terms of the ME universe, and yet the fact that a lot of ME2 fans might not see it would indicate that it won't really have that big an impact on ME3, which is kind of a bummer.  Anyway - if you're an ME2 fan, it's highly recommended.
  
• Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I got excited for the sequel and decided to give this another playthrough.  And it's still as good as it was the first time.

And that brings us to yesterday, when my copy of Halo Reach arrived.

I'll have more to say on Halo as I get further into it, but basically:  it's Halo.  And, also:  I don't know if I like first-person shooters anymore.  Or, rather, that the third-person action genre has gotten so good that first-person shooters kinda feel a little antiquated.  As in:  how come I can't use cover?

Remembrance of Things that Almost Were

I feel like I have about a million things I want to talk about today; I'm not sure how many are actually post-worthy, and I'm definitely not sure how much time I have to write, so we'll see how it goes.

But first things first - I'm now only 15 measly Points away from my goal of amassing 10,000 Points in a year. It's probably too difficult to try to get to 40,000 before the end of the year unless I go on a Points-whoring binge, and to be honest I'd much rather actually enjoy the games I'm playing right now; then again, I'm only 1227 Points away...

And here are some quick recaps before we get to the meat:

• I think I'm almost done with Tomb Raider: Underworld, in every sense of the word. I'm pretty sure I'm in the last level, and unless I feel the need to chase after some (minor) Points, I'm probably not going to play it again. I think they dropped the ball with this title, big time; Legend and Anniversary had generated a lot of goodwill towards a franchise that had been plummeting into oblivion, and Underworld was a fantastic opportunity to really blow us all away, and instead the game feels a bit under-developed. Even something little like cutting out the Croft Manor minigame is a bummer.
  

• I played another 30 minutes of Left 4 Dead with some friends last night - for some reason I got booted off of Xbox Live after we all wiped in the middle of a stage and I couldn't log back in. That game is friggin' awesome. The computer AI is absolutely fantastic - you almost can't tell the difference if one of your friends is handing the reins over to the computer - and the overall pacing is absolutely incredible.

...

This is where I was going to talk about the recent discussion of the reviews of Mirror's Edge that have been circulating around the 'tubes, as well as answering a question from the MTV blog about waiting for DLC, and I was also hoping to put up the synopsis of a conversation I'm having with a friend of mine who is somewhat anti-gaming. But as the fates would have it, I've gotten super-busy at work and so those things will have to wait. Have a great holiday, everyone.

Weekend Recap: pre-Thanksgiving 2008 edition

Last Tuesday I noted that, among other things, I was hoping to increase my Gamerscore by 10,000 points over my total at the end of 2007:

I started the year at 28788; I am currently at 37403. There's still 6 weeks left in the year, so I still have time to make it to an even 10,000 point swing.

I certainly made up a lot of ground over the last few days; by my calculation, I've gained 1075 Points in less than a week, which means I've only got 310 more to go.

At least 600 points came from Scene It: BOS, which doles out the points like they're going out of style. (My wife likes playing the Scene It games, which means I buy them as soon as they come out.) I like this new game a lot; it uses Avatars, which make them seem a little less pointless, everything's gotten a nice graphical make-over, and they seem to have a healthy obsession with Simon Pegg, which is OK with me. The only real problem with the game are the announcers, who are even more horrible than they were in the last game; I mean, they're FUCKING HORRIBLE. Thank God there's an option to mute them.

A few more achievements came from Fallout 3, but that game should not be played for points AT ALL. I was all set to name GTA4 as my Game of the Year, but I have to say that every hour I spend with Fallout 3 makes that decision a little less concrete. I'm about halfway to level 10, and I'm probably going to stay away from the main quest for a little while longer and work on some side stuff. There is so much to see in this game, and the level of detail is simply staggering. Perfect example: I was doing one of the very first sidequests in the game, which required me to go to this bombed out town and pick up some mines; while I was there, I decided to break into some houses and see what there was to loot. And each house that I broke into featured this little unspoken short story of each family's last moments - one house in particular had a pair of skeletons lying in bed holding each other, and it actually made me stop for a second and think about what I was actually seeing. What I love about Fallout 3 is this deeper notion of history; everything you're looting is stuff that belonged to a different time and place - and, well, it belonged to a human being who died. Not many games are able to convey that sense of a lived-in world very well - even Bioshock struggled with it at times.

What else, what else... oh, well, yeah. I caved and bought Tomb Raider: Underworld, mostly because Gamefly kept pushing it back and when I checked Sunday morning, it was slated to ship this coming Tuesday, which is bullshit. My initial reaction is pretty much par for the course: it's Legend with a gorgeous new coat of paint and a really shitty camera. I'm in the Mexico level (which is, I think, the third level if you don't count the prologue), and it's got a wierd non-linear progression which is actually a little annoying, to be honest - Tomb Raider games shouldn't be sandbox-y. I'm also missing the Croft Manor exploration level that's been a favorite feature of mine in the last 2 games, although considering that the very first thing you see in the game is the Manor exploding, it probably makes sense that it's missing. (Maybe it's unlocked after you finish the game?)

Played a tiny little bit of Left 4 Dead; that game is awesome and I need to give it another go.

Oh yeah, also played a bit of A Kingdom For Keflings, which I think I really only downloaded to be eligible for some stupid contest. It's basically a super-lite strategy game, with Avatar support; it's actually a decent time-suck, although I'm not sure how much time I'm going to spend with it. I'll probably finish one game and then go back to Civ Rev for my strategy needs.

Oh, Eidos, what the hell is wrong with you?

The general sense of bummer-dom that I am feeling towards Tomb Raider: Underworld is only getting worse.

1. Gamefly keeps backing up the release date. When I checked on Monday, it indicated that I would already have the game in my hands; as of 12:18pm today, however, they're not even sending it out until tomorrow, which means I won't get it until probably next Tuesday at the earliest.

2. And I should probably be glad I'm not playing it, if the reviews are to be believed. There aren't very many reviews out there, though; I've only seen scores from IGN (7.5) and 1UP (B), and one other review from action button dot net. I've been a little surprised that there haven't been more reviews thus far, but then I came across...

3. ...this morning's Joystiq article about Eidos UK blocking TR:U reviews under 8/10 from publication, which is just mind-boggling.

From the Joystiq piece:

Really Eidos? Really? You didn't lose enough goodwill being blamed for getting the world's most popular video games journalist fired and bringing a respected games portal to its knees? (Yes, we know you denied any involvement. This sort of thing certainly makes that seem credible.) You thought maybe journalists would keep this quiet because you were buds? Because they were worried about not getting advance copies of Just Cause 2?

It's funny; after the Kane&Lynch fiasco, I rescinded my membership from Gamespot in protest and solidarity with Gerstmann and started up this blog. I felt so hurt and betrayed - startlingly so, to be honest, because I certainly wasn't prepared to have such an emotional investment in a fucking videogame website - and it took a rather long time for those feelings to subside.

In the process, though, I was forced to open my eyes a bit and really see what was happening to the industry as a whole. The fallout from Gerstmann-gate revealed a tremendous amount of behind-the-scenes goings-on, not just with the press but with the publishers; suddenly it was revealed just how important things like Metacritic were to the perceived success of a particular title.

I was going to put something in here about how the movie industry does something similar to this, but the more I think about it, the comparison isn't totally fair. If a movie studio is releasing a movie that they know is going to be savaged in the press, they simply elect not to show it to the press so it can't be reviewed, hoping to get as much as they can on the opening weekend before word of mouth can trickle out. What Eidos is doing here, though, is a bit more slimy and evil; they thought they had an AAA title, and they shuttled it off to get reviewed, and now that the first reviews are starting to trickle in with less-than-hoped-for scores, they're trying to suppress the rest of the reviews unless those reviews are favorable.

I read something the other day about how one of the CEOs of a major publisher was saying that "the videogame market is recession-proof." With the economy falling apart and any number of developers closing up shop, though, I'm not entirely sure that it's fair for the market to be taken for granted. And shit like this only makes "the market" that much more skeptical. Until I read this article, I was pretty sure I was going to forgo Gamefly and spend my lunch hour buying TR:U at the Best Buy near my office; now I'm somewhat tempted to take it off my queue altogether.

In the words of The Dude, "this aggression will not stand, man."

GTA DLC; TRU bummer; Gadgets

1. GTA IV DLC revealed (sorta)

It's not quite enough for a Guessing At Future Games feature here on SFTC, but it is certainly something to look forward to during the post-holiday doldrums of 2009. Everyone was wondering what DLC for a GTA game would look like, and this is apparently what it will be - a new character in a new story, and featuring "a whole new side to Liberty City" (which presumably means that it will take place in areas of Liberty City that were not central to Niko Bellic's adventures). No word on length or price just yet; I'm going to guess 800 Points, although I think I'd be prepared to spend up to 1200.


2. Tomb Raider's disappointing reviews

My fondness for the Tomb Raider franchise starts with Legend. Having never owned a PS1 or PS2, I never played the original games and so I never really paid much attention to how terrible the series had gotten (although I do recall playing a demo for whatever TR title was released on the Dreamcast, and absolutely hating it). Legend, however, scratched a very specific itch for me - it had all the fun Prince-of-Persia environmental puzzle solving that I liked, it had decent-enough combat, and it looked and played fantastic. Anniversary was more of the same, which was just fine with me, and so I have rather high expectations for Underworld.

Unfortunately, the reviews are starting to come in, and for the most part everyone seems to be a little disappointed in this one. I obviously can't agree or disagree, since my rental copy still hasn't left Gamefly's offices, but I must admit I'm a little bummed out by this. I'm curious to see if my fanboy-ism will blind me to the game's obvious faults, or if my knowledge of the game's apparent crappiness will only make these things even worse than they actually are; if nothing else, I'm certainly self-aware enough to know how easily swayed I can be by external opinions... except in the case of Metal Gear Solid 4, because nobody will ever convince me that MGS4's storytelling is anything other than a normal-mapped turd.


3. I am in need of a new cellphone. I covet the iPhone, but there's two big things preventing me from pulling the trigger:

• I'm a Verizon customer, and I'm not looking to switch service providers; and
  
• There isn't nearly enough storage on the iPhone for me to use it as my primary music storage device.
  

So I was eagerly awaiting for the Blackberry Storm, Verizon's first big attempt at making an iPhone killer. And, unfortunately, it looks like it still needs some time to cook.

• Engadget
  
• Gizmodo
  

I suppose I can wait a few more months for them to fix the bugs (and, by doing so, avoiding the crush when it launches tomorrow), but still: damn.