I am a consumer whore: Vol. 2, Ep. 1

I've been trying to convince my friend Max to get an Xbox360 for the last year or so; he assures me that he really does want one, but he's trying to cut down his debt, and he's hoping to score it during the holidays. However, he blindsided me on Monday by telling me that he managed to score a Wii, thanks to wiialerts.com.

And so, of course, I had to check out the site and see what it was all about. I've wanted a Wii since launch but they've been impossible to find, and I've gotten used to not having one - especially since there are really only about 5-6 games I'm interested in playing. But, as I said, I felt compelled to check out the site. 15 minutes later, I signed up and set up some alerts; 30 minutes after that, I got my first text message.

Cutting to the chase, then: this morning I got a text message - Circuit City finally had bundles available, and for a pretty reasonable price. And so...

...

...I got one.

The bundle itself isn't necessarily top-notch, at least as far as the selection of games goes. I got:

• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Mario Party 8
• Wii Play (for the extra remote)

I will most likely trade in Brawl and Party for Zelda and maybe RE4 or Okami. I'll check 'em out, of course, but I don't really see myself giving a shit about either of those games.

Anyway. I'm glad I'm finally getting one, although I was truly ready to forgo the Wii altogether in lieu of scoring a PS3 later this summer.

And it's not like I'll be playing it very much once GTA4 drops next week.

I am such a goddamned whore.

(Wii friend codes are always appreciated; I'll post mine once I find out what it is.)

The Weight of Waiting

I am compelled to keep blogging in this space - even more so than on my other, "real-life" blog - because the wait for GTA4 is turning into an all-consuming hunger. I've already taken time off from work for it (even though I have a legitimate and necessary reason for doing so that has nothing at all to do with it), and every time my RSS reader dings, I become inexplicably giddy at the thought of getting new GTA4-related information.

And so today I'm trying to figure out what other soon-to-be-released games I can recall getting this bent out of shape over. This list isn't necessarily reflective of my all-time favorite games (although certainly most of these would make the list); this is simply a list of the games that I absolutely could not wait for any longer.

1. On the 360, there's been a lot of big titles to get excited for - and believe me, I've been foaming at the mouth for most of them, especially Mass Effect - but I guess I'd have to put Oblivion at the top of my list, which was a surprise to me even while it was happening:

I'm not even sure I myself knew how much I was looking forward to Oblivion; certainly I got really caught up in the hype over the last few months; I pre-ordered the Collector's Edition, I sucked up every available preview and direct-feed morsel I could find; I even watched some of Gamespot's 12-hour playtest, which I had originally dismissed as being the most retarded idea I'd ever heard. Here's the funny part - I bought Morrowind - twice, for both PC and Xbox - but while I really appreciated the concept, I never got further than reaching the first quest-related town of Balmora before I lost interest. Between the two platforms I probably put in a total of 8 hours. Why, then, was Oblivion such a coveted purchase? Why was I so deeply enamored with a sequel to a game I'd hardly put any effort into? Was I a sucker for PR? I don't even own an HDTV, so it's not like my inner graphics-whore/crack-addict was going to receive that sort of gratification...

2. On the Xbox, I was tempted to say it's the GTA Double Pack and/or Fable (I was also excited for KOTOR, but not to the same extent, even if its become one of my all-time favorites), but I think it has to be Psychonauts, which had been first announced in 2002 and was one of my primary reasons for buying an Xbox in the first place (along with the Oddworld games, which, sadly, weren't all they could have been). That Psychonauts managed to still be awesome under the weight of years of expectations is a remarkable achievement, even if the Meat Circus ended up driving me (and many others) totally batshit insane.

3. On the PC... well, to be honest, it's been quite a long time since my PC was my primary gaming center, and I can't recall being amped up for a game that I knew I was only going to be playing on my PC. I did get excited for Neverwinter Nights, I guess, but that wasn't an all-encompassing hunger. And I'm not afraid to admit that I've been looking forward for Duke Nukem Forever for, well, forever - and when they finally get around to releasing DukeNukem 3D for XBLA, I will DEFINITELY be going crazy for it.

After that... well, I'm not sure. When I was a little kid with an Atari 2600, I really can't recall getting excited about new releases, because (a) there was no internet, (b) since my parents bought the games for me, I had no choice in the matter as to what to get excited about. If anything, I would get excited to get games that other friends of mine already had. Same thing with my brother's Sega Genesis, which I never bought games for, either. But by the same token, we could play all those old games OVER and OVER and OVER again - we didn't necessarily need anything new when we could keep having fun with what we already had. (Boy, I miss those days!)

So, what about you? What games have you been unable to sit still for?

Crush'd

It's nice having a PSP, even though there's really not a tremendous amount of stuff I can do with it; I put God of War aside so I could play the PSP GTA games, and I haven't even touched the Crisis Core Final Fantasy game yet. The problem is, all those games are somewhat... involving, and you kinda need sound in order to get the full experience, and if you put them down for more than a few days, it's harder to pick them back up and remember what's going on. One of the reasons why I like the DS so much is that, unlike the PSP, there are lots of puzzle games that don't require sound or any complicated set up - if I'm on the subway, or simply playing before bed, I like the idea of simply being in a puzzle, and not having to get involved in some sort of story - I like exercising that specific part of my brain.

Which is why Crush is such a nice change of pace, as far as the PSP goes. I'm already thoroughly entranced by the 2D/3D mechanic because of FEZ which runs along very similar lines, and Crush fills the logic puzzle / no-sound-required PSP void quite admirably. If anything, the game is proving that my brain may not quite be ready for this kind of puzzling; while the game does a pretty good job of easing you into the mechanics, it also ramps up in difficulty at a somewhat accelerated pace - well, at least for me it does.

It's certainly worth at least a rental; there are only 40 levels, so that might not necessitate a purchase. At my current rate, though, it's doubtful I'll see them all any time soon.

Bully for you, bully for me

Was home sick yesterday, which sucked on a multitude of levels - aside from just feeling like crap all day, it was also the first bona fide beautiful day of the year, and all I could do to celebrate was to open my living room window a smidge.

I did get some gaming time in, though, because, well, that's what I do when I'm home sick. And since all I can think about these days is the impending release of GTA4, I spent most of the day playing Rockstar games.

I even put aside God of War on my PSP to get into GTA: Liberty City Stories, and it must be said that while the game itself is definitely showing its age, it's still a pretty remarkable feeling to be playing a fully fleshed-out GTA game on a handheld, especially when it arguably looks better than the original PS2 version.

The vast majority of yesterday, though, was spent getting back into Bully, a game I'd put down a few weeks ago and, for whatever reason, never got around to picking back up. Basically played through all of Chapter 3 and am now a few missions into Chapter 4; I've finished all my morning classes and I think I only have 2 Shop classes and 2 Photography classes left; I've found all 6 transistor radios and as a result I'm almost unstoppable in a fight, even against 5 or 6 jocks. There's a pleasant mix of missions now; some are a little harder than others, but most of them can be beaten in one go. At first I wasn't sure how much of a completist I was aiming to be, but I've all but abandoned the idea of getting 100% now; I'll get all the rubber bands, gnomes and G&G cards (now that I've got the maps) and that'll probably be the extent of it.

One mission cracked me up, and then also kinda made me cringe: Photography 3, I think it was. The mission: go to the seedy part of town (New Coventry) and take 5 pictures of "hobos or dogs". If anybody wants to know why Rockstar's sandbox games "work" on a level that other GTA clones don't, this has to be Exhibit A. Let me pull back the layers on this one:

• Photography 1 was taking pictures of flags; Photography 2 was (if I remember correctly) taking portraits of classmates. But the idea of having high school students actively seeking out and taking pictures of homeless people as a class assignment - especially when the pictures themselves are graded on how crazy and decrepit the people are - is a spot-on impression of every stereotypically pretentious art student out there, and BOY OH BOY did this remind me of people I knew in high school.
  
• But then, when I got to New Coventry, it took me a while to find the hobos, because the seediness of the town ends up making everyone look a little shady and suspicious, and suddenly I found myself making off-the-cuff judgments of character of everybody I rode past.
  
• And then, when you do find the crazy people - or, at least, you take enough pictures of random people and suddenly one of them gets marked as a successful photograph - you now recognize what you're looking for, but the fact that the mission is timed lends a degree of urgency to the mission, because suddenly the mission isn't about documenting the plight of the homeless and the poignancy of the human condition - it's about making sure you snap a picture with enough time to get back to class.

Now, not all of Bully's missions have this many levels of subtext to them - in fact, I'm not necessarily sure that this particular mission was intended to be read with this level of detail, especially since all classes are optional - but goddamn, this one (a) cracked me up and (b) made me a little bit uncomfortable. I guess I should be grateful that the graphics are so last-gen, because doing this mission in an Unreal 3.0 world might have made it somehow less subversive than it ended up being.

Still hoping to have it finished before the 29th, because after that I'm toast. I was thinking about liveblogging my GTA4 experience; as it happens, when GTA4 comes out, my wife will be home recovering from a surgery and I'm taking vacation time to take care of her, and her office is giving her a laptop so that she can work from home; she may or may not still be taking painkillers that week, but I doubt she'll be working, at any rate, so the possibility exists that I could play and type at the same time.

There's also a part of my brain that says: "Fuck that. I want to play GTA4, not document the experience of playing it." And you can't get immersed in a world when you're constantly pulling yourself out of the experience.

Maybe I'll just keep a tape recorder handy.

PSP: God of War

I bought 5 games for my PSP yesterday, which is probably a little too much to digest at once. I tried all of them for about 5 minutes - enough to reach a save point - and then decided to stick with God of War: Chains of Olympus.

Before I even get to GoW, though, let me talk about the PSP itself. This is really the first time I've ever actually held one in my hands, so I can't make any comparisons between the Slim (which is what I bought) and the Original (which I didn't). Generally speaking, it's a pretty impressive little machine. The FMV in Crisis Core: FF7 is friggin' gorgeous, so now I understand the appeal of the PSP as a movie-watching device (as much as David Lynch might disapprove.) That said, the clarity of the FMV only served to point out how not beautiful the actual gameplay graphics are - having played 360 games on an HDTV for so long, it's hard to go back to PS2 graphics (as impressive as they may be for a handheld). The sound is also impressive; I fired up one of the GTA games - I think it was Vice City - and the Foreigner song that opened the game's first scene was shockingly pristine.

The battery life leaves a lot to be desired - 5 hours won't cross the Atlantic. I do appreciate, though, that the PSP tells you exactly how much time is left. I wonder if there's an appreciable difference if the sound is off? I tend to play my DS games without sound, which isn't really a problem since you don't need sound for Crosswords, PuzzleQuest or WordJong. Sound, though, definitely enhances something like God of War.

Which brings me back to God of War. I should maybe feel a wee bit embarrassed that my first experience with the GoW franchise is this PSP edition; I never owned a PS2, what can I say? At least now I understand what all the fuss is about. It doesn't necessarily feel that revolutionary or life-changing - in fact, it kinda feels very familiar. What it does do is provide tons of visceral, bloody, acrobatic combat, and it has a pretty remarkable sense of scale. I've of course heard about the titanic size of bosses in the PS2 games, and I must admit I actually laughed out loud when I was introduced to what I thought was the game's first boss - the monster that I was about to fight was then promptly eaten by the game's real first boss, whose head was twice as big as the entire monster he ate.

I'm about 3 save points in, which obviously isn't very far at all. I think the biggest thing for me is that since I'm totally unfamiliar with Sony's controllers, I am constantly screwing up the Quick-Time Events because I can't remember which button is which. (Whereas on the 360, I'm a total whiz.) I get it, though - I get what the game is trying to do, I get what it's about, and (obviously) whenever I get around to getting a PS3, I will absolutely be on board for GoW3.

PSP'd!

So I couldn't contain myself any longer; on my lunch hour today, I went to the Best Buy over on 5th Avenue and bought:

• PSP slim
• 2gb memory stick
• Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
• God of War: Chains of Olympus
• MLB08
• GTA: Liberty City Stories
• GTA: Vice City Stories

Total: $400.13. It's burning a hole in my bag; all I want to do is rip open the box and start playing, but I know that as soon as I do, I'll start getting super-busy at work, and in any event, I didn't buy any sort of carrying case, and I don't really want to have it just sitting loose in my bag.

That said. This is a watershed moment: this is my first piece of Sony-manufactured gaming equipment that I've ever purchased. I played a lot of PS1 at my buddy Jongre's apartment back in my post-college years (mostly the Oddworld games, with some Crash Bandicoot here and there), but never owned one myself; I bought a Dreamcast instead of a PS2, and then bought an Xbox; I had a Gameboy and then a DS, which covered my handheld needs, and I'm still holding off on a PS3 until later this year.

The PSP, though... it's strange. I've wanted one ever since they announced it, but then the dead pixel thing happened when it launched and outraged everybody, and until recently there's been almost nothing worth playing on it. Plus, that horrendous "all i want for christmas is a psp" fake-commercial really turned me off - even now I've got that fucking song stuck in my head.

I've seen people playing it on the subway and I'm always curious to see it in action, and yet I never really get that good a look; display units at stores are generally useless, since they're (a) never turned on or (b) playing something I don't care about.

There are other games that I'm curious to check out...

• Lumines (although I've already got it on XBLA, and I'm not very good at it)
• the 3d Castlevania game
• Wipeout / Wipeout Pure
• flOw
• Jean D'arc
• Disgaea (or however you spell it)

...but I'm not, like, foaming at the mouth for any of them, and I'm sure I can track them down on GameFly.

If I have time tonight, I'll try to have a full rundown for tomorrow.

Bully; Flatout

This lead-up to GTA4's release is killing me; nothing but crap for new releases. So while I'm bulldozing my way through Bully, I'm also catching up on some older titles via GameFly.

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage is a game I wanted to love; I was a fan of the original title on the Xbox and I was looking forward to the inevitable next-gen entry. In some ways, it's great: it's gorgeous, and even with 12 cars driving through dirt and running over piles of tires and debris, it always maintains a smooth frame rate. However, it's also frustratingly difficult. I won my first few races pretty easily (and the rubber-band AI was actually pretty effective in carving out some exciting victories), and then, suddenly, I was getting my ass kicked left and right, and no amount of restarting (or car-tuning) made any discernible difference. Which sucks.

And as for Bully: I finished Chapter 2 last night. Probably 12-15 hours in at this point. What does it say about me that my main priority with this game was to make sure I attended and excelled in every class? At this point, though, I'm glad I've been so studious - it's unlocked lots of useful skills. My biggest complaint in Bully is that the game clock moves at a tremendous rate, and I feel like there's never any real time to explore or do anything, which somewhat defeats the purpose of playing in a sandbox. Each day in Bully, for me, goes something like this:

8:00: wake up, save game.
9:00: find class, do class.
11:30: save.
1:00: class.
3:30: save.
3:30-12:00 - jobs/missions/errands/exploration.

Which is, in some ways, what real life is like. Except that in Bully, one minute = one second, so each afternoon I feel like I only have time to do one or two things. With so many cops around, truancy is a dangerous option. This is why I feel compelled to complete all my classes, so that I don't have to hang around the school.

Anyway. I'm not sure it will get me through until GTA4's release, but it'll have to do for now.