We've been wanting to get a STFC podcast going for a while, now, and we've been so busy with other things that we haven't been able to figure out the logistics of making it happen. (Speaking of which, if anybody reading this can recommend a reliable method of recording Skype calls, please leave a comment below.)
In the absence of having a podcast, then, what follows is a fake transcript of what a STFC podcast might sound like, as we've been having a rather interesting email conversation about Uncharted and Brutal Legend over the last few days and we don't feel like keeping it to ourselves:
...
Gred: Goddamn, the Uncharted 2 reviews have me salivating!!! They even motivated me to start clearing my plate for its release. I went back and played a bunch of Batman. I think I'm nearing the final act (just left Croc's lair, now on my way to have it out with Poison Ivy in the Botanical Garden). Once that's wrapped up, I'll go back and push through Uncharted 1. And if there's still time left over before U2 comes out, I'll finish HL2 Episode 2. I hope you won't be too quick to swear off Uncharted 2 multiplayer! I know you're not an online shooter guy, but if it's as fun as the initial buzz suggests, then there should be plenty of fun to be had even by the sucky...
Fuck. I just remembered that Uncharted 2 and Brutal Legend come out on the same day. I'll buy both, but how am I supposed to choose one to play first???
Jervo: 1. You are indeed near the end of Batman. But I would make preparing for U2 your highest priority.
2. I tried the U2 multiplayer demo last night for a few minutes; it's definitely U2 multiplayer. As combat is my least favorite part of Uncharted in general, I'm not entirely sure how much time I'm ultimately going to spend with it (especially since my bluetooth headset doesn't always work), but it's solid and clearly no joke. If you're so inclined, I'd say you should download it when you get home, and maybe we can try it out together before getting DiRTy.
3. I've preordered both U2 and BL, and having played the BL demo already, I think my choice is clear; I'm playing U2 first. I liked the BL demo, although I'd already seen most (if not all) of it already - it's more or less what they showed at E3. And I must admit that I'm not as excited about BL as I feel I ought to be. The more I hear about it and how it changes from a GoW action game to more of an Overlord-type RTS, I get a little... I don't know... nervous. U2, on the other hand, is right in my sweet spot; that's the sort of game I want to be playing right this second.
Gred: I'm super excited about BL. I totally trust Double Fine. Psychonauts certainly wasn't perfect, and parts of it were tedious, but it was all wrapped in such a terrifically imagined world with such outstanding writing that I was able to forgive a lot. I don't expect BL to be the be-all end-all in terms of its gameplay, plus I'm beginning to wish Jack Black had never become involved, though that has admittedly provided a good visibility boost which should help sales. But until Double Fine fails me I will buy their games on day one, RTS elements and all. So that's why the strategy stuff doesn't make me nervous as far as my own enjoyment of the game. But it does worry me from a potential sales standpoint... A game based on an original IP that doesn't lend itself to easy categorization could find itself in limbo at retail. Not that Double Fine should kowtow to the mainstream 100%, but Lord knows they could use a hit.
That said, I probably will play U2 first. Seems like U2 lends itself more to burning through the single player campaign in a fevered rush, whereas I could see myself taking my sweet time with BL.
Jervo: I'm an old-school Jack Black fan; I am generally embarrassed whenever he appears in anything these days (except for Tropic Thunder) but I loved Tenacious D before it was cool to do so, and everything I've seen of BL confirms that it was a perfect casting choice. (I was going to say something snarky here about how voice acting's impact on gameplay is less than negligible, but that's not necessarily true; it's only true when it's obvious that 90% of the development budget went towards the voice acting. Frankly, one of the things that made the first Uncharted so endearing was the quality of the voice acting, and all the reviews indicate that U2 is even better in that regard.) I'm sure BL will be enjoyable, and I've already ordered it, so I feel like I've done my part in terms of supporting DoubleFine. It's just that, well, U2 is going to be jaw-dropping.
Gred: Dunno if you saw that Action Button reviewed the first Uncharted: http://www.actionbutton.net/?p=607. I haven't read it yet, but I assume it's a great read!
Jervo: I told you about this the other day. They call it a "murder simulator."
Gred: Oh. Right.
Yeah, so I read it. Definitely not one of their better pieces. I thought they'd take it somewhere more interesting, but they kind of briefly made their point, and then the review fizzled out.
Jervo: Well, considering that our main problem with the game is that you can't kill the bad guys easily enough, I think it's a pretty insightful point to make. The game does such a fantastic job in terms of story and presentation and motivation and yet it can't be ignored that you're killing hundreds of human beings - and I was never actually sure why I was killing them, except that they were in my way. It's a similar observation to that of going to Rapture in Bioshock and eating potato chips out of the garbage that are at least several years old and getting healthier as a result.
Gred: The Bioshock potato chip thing makes very little sense, particularly because of how dissonant some of the contrivances in Bioshock are with their bend-over backwards attempts to get you to buy into the plausibility of Rapture, as the ActionButton guys brilliantly observe and explain in their review.
All the Uncharted killing, though, makes at least some sense to the extent that all of these guys are trying to kill you. I agree that the combat gets tiresome and that the game would have been more interesting with fewer, more considered confrontations. But movie-like games remain games nonetheless. They require a different sort of suspension of disbelief than movies do. Drake is not Indiana Jones. Drake leaps up crumbling fortress walls hundreds of feet up as a matter of course, whereas if Indy did that repeatedly (rather than, say, as a unique set-piece moment) we might not so readily accept it in the context of a movie. It's not apples to apples.
But if we do want to compare apples to apples, I don't really see how Uncharted is all that different from most large-scale shooters. How is exterminating all of these guys is different from annihilating untold numbers of Covenant, German soldiers, Locusts, etc.? Sure, those are framed as larger-scale "save the world" scenarios, but at the end of the day it's still "Kill them or they'll kill you." Drake's own adventure admittedly starts as a mere treasure hunt, which is hardly the noblest of causes nor one that would justify a triple-digit body count. But as far as I've gotten in the game, they've worked in enough alternative motivations (search for and rescue Elena, avenge Sully) that the killing just doesn't bug me from a moral standpoint (though it gets pretty damned tiresome from a pacing/fun perspective). Plus, the enemies in Uncharted are presumably mercenaries, i.e. men who have entered the private army business for money. These guys (including Drake!) are all vying for a big fat prize, and they are all willingly playing a high stakes game. In that regard, it wouldn't be a tragedy from a story perspective if Drake was killed during his quest. He's a mercenary of sorts himself. From a gameplay perspective, of course, his death sucks.
The Uncharted body count doesn't keep me up at night. Far less morally challenging or ambiguous than, say, the countless games which turn World War II into a shooting gallery. (Sure, I play them. But there is something about it that's unsettling.)
Jervo: Indy's personal body count in Raiders, by my perhaps faulty recollection, is actually rather low. He punches a lot of dudes, and knocks out a few guys to change clothes, but he really just shoots that one dude with the sword - and according to film legend that was an ad-lib by Harrison Ford because he was violently ill and didn't want to do the fight scene choreography. The guy he fights by the plane ends up getting his own head chopped into sushi; shit, even God ends up killing more dudes than Indiana Jones.
I'll admit that the combat in Uncharted is necessary as it breaks up the action and creates a different sort of tension. It's a game, after all, and you kill dudes in games. And it was clearly something that the design team thought about and tried to implement as well as they possibly could - the cover system works well, the death animations are convincing, and the whole thing would've been perfect if the enemies hadn't been so bulletproof. As long as we're talking about Uncharted influences, Tomb Raider's combat (at least in the more recent, better iterations) is not nearly as much fun or as well implemented - of course, there's not nearly as much of it, either, so it kinda evens out.
But I submit that Uncharted is different from other large-scale shooters because Nathan Drake is not a soldier, and he's not saving the world. He's not killing aliens or Nazis or zombies. More to the point, I don't want Uncharted to be Modern Warfare with platforming and puzzles. My favorite parts of Uncharted - as they are in Tomb Raider and other games of that sort - are the exploring and the puzzle solving, when you're not rushing against a clock or dodging bullets, and you're free to examine the environment at your own pace. That's the part where you actually feel like a treasure hunter, because it's actually you and your brain that's solving the puzzles; that's the part that could actually happen in real life. You don't have to suspend any disbelief (other than the idea that every archeological find can only be found by moving blocks onto weighted floors).
Gred: See, that's where I think their point is interesting. Would/could Uncharted have been a sales hit without all that shooting? Shooters sell. Is there a "realistic" style exploration-based adventure game that sold out there? I can't think of one. So they are totally right to call bullshit on all of the gamers who cry foul and say "Not all games have killing!" Right. Just the ones that sell. And 85% of the games I buy. But I still find the term "murder simulator" to be a bit silly.
Jervo: Would Uncharted have been a sales hit without the shooting? No, probably not. Does that suck? Yeah, it kinda does. Can we be grateful, then, that the combat mechanics in Uncharted are at least well-designed and constructed, except for the bulletproof enemies? Absolutely, and that's probably got as much to do with why the game did so well as anything else. Hell, that's why they built a whole multiplayer mode around it.
BUT.
There's still way too much killing in Uncharted than is necessary for the game to still be successful and enjoyable, and that's a stone-cold fact. And the fact that the enemies are bulletproof merely exacerbates how tedious it becomes, this killing of people over and over and over again. We can assume AB purposefully uses the term "murder simulator" to recall good ol' Jack Thompson's railing against GTA, and in that context they're probably right - I've probably killed more virtual people in Uncharted than I did in GTA4. (Not counting driving accidents, of course.)
Gred: Sucks that it wouldn't have sold without shooting: Herry hoo. [Translation: Very true.]
Too much killing: Herry hoo. (Though I still see the high body count as a difference of degree and not kind from most other games.)
I love that running people over in GTA games doesn't count! Even if you try to play the earlier games as a "nice" criminal who avoids killing the "innocent" (Niko can't really be played as nice), you can't avoid running people over or the game will just be hell. So it's a "necessary" evil, the necessity being that it would otherwise take forever to drive anywhere!
And then, suddenly, we were both hit by a truck.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Friday, September 18, 2009
Disappointing Sequels, and a Rock Band Wishlist
I've done just about everything I can do in Beatles: Rock Band without losing my friggin' mind, which is good, because there's other stuff out there that needs to be played.
The good:
DiRT 2
The first DiRT is still one of my favorite driving games, ever. As a confessed graphics whore, it was (and still is) jaw-dropping; it's the game I was playing both before and after I bought my 40" HDTV, and for a long time was the game I put in when I wanted to show off the TV. But that aside, the game was a complete package, oozing with polish; the career mode was well designed, the driving model was fun and accessible, the course design was varied and plentiful... even the menus were interactive and fun to play around with. And the replays... wow.
DiRT 2 has some mighty big shoes to fill, then, as far as I'm concerned. And so even though I've played quite a bit of it over the last few days and I've enjoyed my time with it a great deal, I'm not entirely sure that it fills them. It's not a bad game, by any means; it's still incredibly polished, the graphics are even better, the driving model is still fun.... but the package itself feels a bit... small. I haven't done a count, but it certainly feels like there's a significantly fewer amount of tracks to race on than in the first game, which is a bit of a bummer. With a graphics engine that gorgeous, I want to see more than the same tracks over and over again. The addition of an in-game rewind - in order to correct mistakes that would otherwise cost you the race - is really the biggest change to the game, and it does come in handy although most of the time I still end up just restarting the whole race if something catastrophic happens. The game has an achievement tracker and also keeps track of other statistics that can reward you with extra XP, and that's certainly much appreciated. I'm just... I don't know. Perhaps my expectations were a bit too unreasonable.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2
Speaking of sequels with high expectations, I played M:UA2 last night for about 20 minutes and got thoroughly depressed with how shitty it was. I suppose I could've soldiered on, but my gaming time is at a premium these days and I'd rather have a good time instead of slogging through something that ought to be much better. The camera is frequently pulled out way too far, making it hard to see what I'm doing (or even what character I'm playing), and there are certain glitches in the special powers that drove me crazy - there's an Iron Man/Wolverine combo move that I tried using, and each time Wolverine automatically faced the wrong way, resulting in a waste of accumulated power. Right now this is in the running - along with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix - as my biggest disappointment of 2009. Sometimes you only need a few minutes with something before you realize that you're wasting your time.
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Was on a forum the other day and the topic du jour was guessing the next band to receive the full deluxe Rock Band treatment. It seemed pretty obvious to everybody that the answer to that question is Led Zeppelin. Having seen now how both Rock Band and Guitar Hero treat their special packages, one would hope that the surviving members of Zep would steer towards Rock Band, but I'm sure it'll ultimately come down to the franchise that pays them more up front. But it got me thinking about what other packages I'd pay money for:
The good:
DiRT 2
The first DiRT is still one of my favorite driving games, ever. As a confessed graphics whore, it was (and still is) jaw-dropping; it's the game I was playing both before and after I bought my 40" HDTV, and for a long time was the game I put in when I wanted to show off the TV. But that aside, the game was a complete package, oozing with polish; the career mode was well designed, the driving model was fun and accessible, the course design was varied and plentiful... even the menus were interactive and fun to play around with. And the replays... wow.
DiRT 2 has some mighty big shoes to fill, then, as far as I'm concerned. And so even though I've played quite a bit of it over the last few days and I've enjoyed my time with it a great deal, I'm not entirely sure that it fills them. It's not a bad game, by any means; it's still incredibly polished, the graphics are even better, the driving model is still fun.... but the package itself feels a bit... small. I haven't done a count, but it certainly feels like there's a significantly fewer amount of tracks to race on than in the first game, which is a bit of a bummer. With a graphics engine that gorgeous, I want to see more than the same tracks over and over again. The addition of an in-game rewind - in order to correct mistakes that would otherwise cost you the race - is really the biggest change to the game, and it does come in handy although most of the time I still end up just restarting the whole race if something catastrophic happens. The game has an achievement tracker and also keeps track of other statistics that can reward you with extra XP, and that's certainly much appreciated. I'm just... I don't know. Perhaps my expectations were a bit too unreasonable.
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2
Speaking of sequels with high expectations, I played M:UA2 last night for about 20 minutes and got thoroughly depressed with how shitty it was. I suppose I could've soldiered on, but my gaming time is at a premium these days and I'd rather have a good time instead of slogging through something that ought to be much better. The camera is frequently pulled out way too far, making it hard to see what I'm doing (or even what character I'm playing), and there are certain glitches in the special powers that drove me crazy - there's an Iron Man/Wolverine combo move that I tried using, and each time Wolverine automatically faced the wrong way, resulting in a waste of accumulated power. Right now this is in the running - along with Puzzle Quest: Galactrix - as my biggest disappointment of 2009. Sometimes you only need a few minutes with something before you realize that you're wasting your time.
---------------------------
Was on a forum the other day and the topic du jour was guessing the next band to receive the full deluxe Rock Band treatment. It seemed pretty obvious to everybody that the answer to that question is Led Zeppelin. Having seen now how both Rock Band and Guitar Hero treat their special packages, one would hope that the surviving members of Zep would steer towards Rock Band, but I'm sure it'll ultimately come down to the franchise that pays them more up front. But it got me thinking about what other packages I'd pay money for:
- U2.
U2 is the reason why I decided to teach myself how to play guitar in the first place. But leaving my personal preference aside, U2 is still one of the biggest bands in the world, they have a recognizable mythos, they have a vivid and memorable visual style, and they have an incredibly solid catalog of work; I'd easily be able to find 45 U2 songs worth playing. - Pink Floyd.
Another mythic band with beloved albums and distinct visual flair. That said, there's a few things standing in the way - for one thing, I'm not sure that David Gilmour and Roger Waters will ever agree on anything ever again, and for another, a lot of their music is on the mellow side; it might be hard to stand up and play Pink Floyd songs for a few hours, even if you're on the right drugs.
- The Smiths / The Cure.
Johnny Marr is one of the most criminally overlooked guitarists of the 20th century, and I would kill to be able to pretend to play his guitar parts, mostly because they're so difficult to play on a real guitar. Morrissey sings out of tune all the time, though, so I'm guessing it might be difficult to score. But whatever - they're the Smiths, they fucking rule. And as long as the 30+ crowd is looking to get nostalgic and depressed via plastic instruments, they might as well go all the way and throw in a bunch of Cure songs as well, to keep both sides of the Atlantic satisfied. I suppose I could be satisfied with a gigantic 20-song DLC package with all the great late 80's / early 90's "college" music, though, so let's just leave it at that.
Friday, September 11, 2009
Beatles: RB Impressions
There was never a doubt in my mind that I wouldn't enjoy every minute I spent with The Beatles: Rock Band; aside from being a big fan of the RB platform, I have been a huge Beatles fan for most of my waking life and I've spent almost every minute since my packages arrived on 9/9 either playing the game or listening to the remastered albums. I plowed through the game's story mode in a few short hours and kept on going, playing each of the game's 45 songs on at least 2 different instruments. (The only thing I haven't done yet is sing, which is usually my last option in regular Rock Band anyway.)
Any concern of mine that this was just an easy cash-in was immediately wiped away; a tremendous amount of love and care went into the crafting of this experience, and it shows. The bass lines are all tremendous, but the guitar experience is just as interesting, especially since there's quite a few songs where there are no discernable guitar parts, so the guitar line is transferred to horns or strings or piano. Even just the sound of clicking on stuff in the menus while holding a guitar put a smile on my face - it's all little samples from "Getting Better." Hearing in-studio chatter while the next song loads might not seem like a big deal to the casual fan but to a die-hard it's so incredibly cool.
But I must admit that I wasn't sure if my wife would care. She's ambivalent towards the Beatles; she doesn't like the super-early stuff but overall she doesn't mind them, even though she doesn't listen to them. She likes Rock Band, though, and she knew that I was going apeshit for the Beatles version, and I suppose my enthusiasm was infectious. Before we started, though, she was a little apprehensive; she didn't think she knew any songs besides the really obvious ones. But she picked up her guitar and began to play, anyway.
You know where this is going, of course. I had the game pick out a random setlist of 7 songs and I'll be damned if she wasn't singing along to all of them. Even she didn't know she knew all those songs. So we picked another random 7 (I'm not sure why 7 was the magic number) and, again, she sang along to all of them, even as she clicked away at the guitar parts.
I'm 33 years old, and I suspect that most people my age have the Beatles hardwired into their DNA whether they know it or not. I don't know that my parents would ever enjoy playing the game, as they'd probably be fighting the controls the whole time, but certainly they might enjoy watching us play it; the game looks fantastic and the music sounds as good as it ever has. I suspect, though, that the game's real coup is how it will introduce little kids to the Beatles. What better way to appreciate the music than to feel like you're playing it?
I was listening to the AV Club's Beatles podcast and they hit on something very true in the show's closing moments - the Beatles might just be the last musical group that 20th and 21st century Americans can all agree upon as being truly great. The game does as much to ensure that the band's legacy will continue to live on, and that's no easy task; look at Activision's gross mishandling of Kurt Cobain's likeness in Guitar Hero 5 as proof that it's very much possible to totally screw it up.
The Beatles: Rock Band is very easy to recommend. Yes, you can bitch that you can't import the Beatles songs into RB2 and vice versa, but that's really just you being lazy and not wanting to get up off the couch and change the disk. It's not an issue for me; I couldn't just play one Beatles song, anyway, without wanting to play the rest.
Any concern of mine that this was just an easy cash-in was immediately wiped away; a tremendous amount of love and care went into the crafting of this experience, and it shows. The bass lines are all tremendous, but the guitar experience is just as interesting, especially since there's quite a few songs where there are no discernable guitar parts, so the guitar line is transferred to horns or strings or piano. Even just the sound of clicking on stuff in the menus while holding a guitar put a smile on my face - it's all little samples from "Getting Better." Hearing in-studio chatter while the next song loads might not seem like a big deal to the casual fan but to a die-hard it's so incredibly cool.
But I must admit that I wasn't sure if my wife would care. She's ambivalent towards the Beatles; she doesn't like the super-early stuff but overall she doesn't mind them, even though she doesn't listen to them. She likes Rock Band, though, and she knew that I was going apeshit for the Beatles version, and I suppose my enthusiasm was infectious. Before we started, though, she was a little apprehensive; she didn't think she knew any songs besides the really obvious ones. But she picked up her guitar and began to play, anyway.
You know where this is going, of course. I had the game pick out a random setlist of 7 songs and I'll be damned if she wasn't singing along to all of them. Even she didn't know she knew all those songs. So we picked another random 7 (I'm not sure why 7 was the magic number) and, again, she sang along to all of them, even as she clicked away at the guitar parts.
I'm 33 years old, and I suspect that most people my age have the Beatles hardwired into their DNA whether they know it or not. I don't know that my parents would ever enjoy playing the game, as they'd probably be fighting the controls the whole time, but certainly they might enjoy watching us play it; the game looks fantastic and the music sounds as good as it ever has. I suspect, though, that the game's real coup is how it will introduce little kids to the Beatles. What better way to appreciate the music than to feel like you're playing it?
I was listening to the AV Club's Beatles podcast and they hit on something very true in the show's closing moments - the Beatles might just be the last musical group that 20th and 21st century Americans can all agree upon as being truly great. The game does as much to ensure that the band's legacy will continue to live on, and that's no easy task; look at Activision's gross mishandling of Kurt Cobain's likeness in Guitar Hero 5 as proof that it's very much possible to totally screw it up.
The Beatles: Rock Band is very easy to recommend. Yes, you can bitch that you can't import the Beatles songs into RB2 and vice versa, but that's really just you being lazy and not wanting to get up off the couch and change the disk. It's not an issue for me; I couldn't just play one Beatles song, anyway, without wanting to play the rest.
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
The Calm Before The Ridiculousness
It's 9/8/09, which means that in a little over 24 hours I'm going to be in some sort of Beatles-induced catatonic stupor, and then the wheels totally fly off shortly after that in terms of the fall release calendar. This is probably a good place, then, for me to check in before I check out.
So, then, first things first - please accept my humble apologies for the lack of regular updating. Blame it on the crappy summer release schedule, which coincided perfectly with an absurd uptick in my own personal music-related endeavors.
The last few weeks, though, have yielded both some free time and some really, really good games to be played. Here's some quick impressions:
"As a gentleman, I feel that it is my duty to take one of these balloons."
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Here's my to-do list for the rest of 2009.
*All titles 360 unless otherwise noted*
MUST PLAY:
Beatles Rock Band
Dirt 2
Scribblenauts (DS)
Mario & Luigi 2 (DS)
Brutal Legend
Uncharted 2 (PS3)
Borderlands
Modern Warfare 2
Dragon Age
L4D2
INTERESTED IN:
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Katamari Forever (PS3)
Dead Space Extraction (Wii)
Alpha Protocol
Ratchet & Clank (PS3)
Forza 3
Blur
Assassin's Creed 2
Saboteur
DO NOT CARE
Halo ODST
So, then, first things first - please accept my humble apologies for the lack of regular updating. Blame it on the crappy summer release schedule, which coincided perfectly with an absurd uptick in my own personal music-related endeavors.
The last few weeks, though, have yielded both some free time and some really, really good games to be played. Here's some quick impressions:
- Batman: Arkham Asylum
- Shadow Complex
- Trials HD
- Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box
"As a gentleman, I feel that it is my duty to take one of these balloons."
- Wolfenstein
------------
Here's my to-do list for the rest of 2009.
*All titles 360 unless otherwise noted*
MUST PLAY:
Beatles Rock Band
Dirt 2
Scribblenauts (DS)
Mario & Luigi 2 (DS)
Brutal Legend
Uncharted 2 (PS3)
Borderlands
Modern Warfare 2
Dragon Age
L4D2
INTERESTED IN:
Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Katamari Forever (PS3)
Dead Space Extraction (Wii)
Alpha Protocol
Ratchet & Clank (PS3)
Forza 3
Blur
Assassin's Creed 2
Saboteur
DO NOT CARE
Halo ODST
Monday, July 27, 2009
What I Played This Weekend: "Oh right, I own a Wii" edition
I've said this before, but in the context of this particular post it bears repeating - there once was a time when my hunger for a Wii was all-consuming. My heart and wallet may have belonged to Microsoft, but I yearned for something more; I ached to waggle. And, most importantly, I wanted to get my wife interested in gaming - or, at least, gaming with me. She was never going to get into Halo or Portal, but at least we could play tennis or bowling for a little while.
The irony, of course, is that once the novelty of the Wii's control scheme wore off, the crushing disappointment started to sink in. There were no games to look forward to, at least to someone in my demographic; Nintendo saw their revenue streams coming in from non-gamers and you can hardly fault them for trying to make money, especially in this shitty economy. That said, my enthusiasm for the Wii didn't drop off as much as it entirely evaporated, and I know I'm not the only one - when people came over to my apartment for birthday parties and other such gatherings, we would always pull out Rock Band instead of Wii Sports. It is true that my wife and I had started to use the Wii again in recent months, but only as a goddamned exercise machine. This was not my beautiful game console.
So why the hell did I buy Wii Sports Resort yesterday? Why did I succumb to Nintendo's charms, again? Why did I enable Nintendo to continue to ignore me?
I can't really answer that without offering at least one rationalization: I didn't actually spend any cash in order to get it. I traded in my PSP and all 7 PSP games I owned specifically so that it could be a cashless transaction. Because as disappointed as I'd been in the Wii, I was even more disappointed in the PSP, and there was even less to look forward to on that platform.
Anyway. Wii Sports Resort is what Wii Sports should've been. It's yet another collection of mini-games, in both single- and multi-player configurations, and the big difference in this collection is that the Wii Remote's new add-on makes the Remote... more sensitive? It's hard to explain what's different about the Motion Plus controller add-on thing until you try the frisbee mini-game. Suffice it to say, it is as close to throwing an actual frisbee as one can get. Similarly, the ping-pong mini-game is remarkable, especially in terms of how you can throw different kinds of spin on your returns. I was as big a fan of Rockstar's Table Tennis as anyone, but I must admit that the ping-pong game in WSR is arguably more engaging.
The rest of the mini-games are pretty hit or miss. Archery is certainly interesting; the sword-fighting game is fun but not particularly deep; bowling feels pretty much identical to the previous iteration, and golf is actually much harder now that the remote is more sensitive to wrist positioning. I suspect that I'll play this just as long as my wife remains interested, and then that'll probably be it.
----------------------------
As long as the Wii was powered up, though, I figured it would maybe be a good time to get back into Super Mario Galaxy. I had been enjoying it thoroughly at first, but got hung up after getting my 15th star or so; then I tried to go back to the earlier levels to stock up on some easy 1-ups, and found that the game (smartly?) makes that prospect a bit trickier than I'd anticipated. In any event, I got past whatever it was that had gotten me stuck before, and now I guess I'm back in it. I'm up to 21 stars now, and I'm continually impressed with each new world's mechanics. I suppose it could be argued that if the Wii produced nothing of value except SMG, it would still be worth a purchase. It could also be argued that the first half of the previous sentence is actually, literally true.
The irony, of course, is that once the novelty of the Wii's control scheme wore off, the crushing disappointment started to sink in. There were no games to look forward to, at least to someone in my demographic; Nintendo saw their revenue streams coming in from non-gamers and you can hardly fault them for trying to make money, especially in this shitty economy. That said, my enthusiasm for the Wii didn't drop off as much as it entirely evaporated, and I know I'm not the only one - when people came over to my apartment for birthday parties and other such gatherings, we would always pull out Rock Band instead of Wii Sports. It is true that my wife and I had started to use the Wii again in recent months, but only as a goddamned exercise machine. This was not my beautiful game console.
So why the hell did I buy Wii Sports Resort yesterday? Why did I succumb to Nintendo's charms, again? Why did I enable Nintendo to continue to ignore me?
I can't really answer that without offering at least one rationalization: I didn't actually spend any cash in order to get it. I traded in my PSP and all 7 PSP games I owned specifically so that it could be a cashless transaction. Because as disappointed as I'd been in the Wii, I was even more disappointed in the PSP, and there was even less to look forward to on that platform.
Anyway. Wii Sports Resort is what Wii Sports should've been. It's yet another collection of mini-games, in both single- and multi-player configurations, and the big difference in this collection is that the Wii Remote's new add-on makes the Remote... more sensitive? It's hard to explain what's different about the Motion Plus controller add-on thing until you try the frisbee mini-game. Suffice it to say, it is as close to throwing an actual frisbee as one can get. Similarly, the ping-pong mini-game is remarkable, especially in terms of how you can throw different kinds of spin on your returns. I was as big a fan of Rockstar's Table Tennis as anyone, but I must admit that the ping-pong game in WSR is arguably more engaging.
The rest of the mini-games are pretty hit or miss. Archery is certainly interesting; the sword-fighting game is fun but not particularly deep; bowling feels pretty much identical to the previous iteration, and golf is actually much harder now that the remote is more sensitive to wrist positioning. I suspect that I'll play this just as long as my wife remains interested, and then that'll probably be it.
----------------------------
As long as the Wii was powered up, though, I figured it would maybe be a good time to get back into Super Mario Galaxy. I had been enjoying it thoroughly at first, but got hung up after getting my 15th star or so; then I tried to go back to the earlier levels to stock up on some easy 1-ups, and found that the game (smartly?) makes that prospect a bit trickier than I'd anticipated. In any event, I got past whatever it was that had gotten me stuck before, and now I guess I'm back in it. I'm up to 21 stars now, and I'm continually impressed with each new world's mechanics. I suppose it could be argued that if the Wii produced nothing of value except SMG, it would still be worth a purchase. It could also be argued that the first half of the previous sentence is actually, literally true.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
The Beatles: Rock Band - set list guess, reconsidered
Here's my original guess at the Beatles: Rock Band set list, from February.
Anyway, I bring this up because 25 of the game's 45 songs have been confirmed by EA. As Kotaku reported this morning, those songs (with appropriate "nailed it" / "missed it" commentary) are:
Can't. Fucking. Wait.
- She Loves You
- I Wanna Hold Your Hand
- Love Me Do
- Help!
- I Saw Her Standing There
- Please Please Me
- A Hard Day's Night
- Can't Buy Me Love
- Eight Days a Week
- Ticket To Ride
- Yesterday
- I Feel Fine
- Paperback Writer
- Rain
- We Can Work It Out
- Revolution
- Get Back
- Drive My Car
- The Word
- In My Life
- Taxman
- She Said, She Said
- And Your Bird Can Sing
- Doctor Robert
- Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
- Getting Better
- Good Morning Good Morning
- A Day In the Life
- Hello Goodbye
- Strawberry Fields Forever
- All You Need Is Love
- Back in the U.S.S.R.
- While My Guitar Gently Weeps
- Birthday
- Everybody's Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey
- Helter Skelter
- Come Together
- Something
- Octopus's Garden
- Here Comes The Sun
- Mean Mr. Mustard -> Polythene Pam -> She Came In Through The Bathroom Window -> Golden Slumbers -> Carry That Weight -> The End
- Get Back
- Dig a Pony
- I've Got A Feeling
- The Ballad of John and Yoko
Anyway, I bring this up because 25 of the game's 45 songs have been confirmed by EA. As Kotaku reported this morning, those songs (with appropriate "nailed it" / "missed it" commentary) are:
- "Back in the U.S.S.R." [yes]
- "Can't Buy Me Love" [yes]
- "Day Tripper" [how did I miss this?]
- "Eight Days a Week" [yes]
- "Get Back" [yes, twice]
- "Here Comes the Sun" yes
- "I Am the Walrus" [I left this out on purpose, b/c I had no idea how they'd do it. this is one of my favorite Beatles songs!]
- "I Feel Fine" [yes]
- "I Saw Her Standing There" [yes]
- "I Want to Hold Your Hand" [yes]
- "Octopus's Garden" [yes]
- "Paperback Writer" [yes]
- "Revolution" [yes]
- "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" [yes]
- "Taxman" [yes]
- "Twist and Shout" [didn't guess this, for some reason - but I'm not crazy about their early, pre-Rubber Soul stuff]
- "Within You Without You" [didn't think this would make it since it's so unconventional, but they are using the drumbeat from Tomorrow Never Knows, which is awesome
- "Yellow Submarine" i'd guessed there'd only be one Ringo song]
- "With A Little Help From My Friends" [so i definitely didn't think there'd be 3 Ringo songs]
- "Birthday" [yes]
- "I Got a Feeling" [yes]
- "Dig a Pony" [yes]
- "Do You Want To Know A Secret" [not even sure I've heard this song before]
- "I Wanna Be Your Man" [see #23]
- "And Your Bird Can Sing" [yes]
Can't. Fucking. Wait.
Monday, July 13, 2009
Everything Old is New Again: Uncharted
I'm resurrecting the "Everything Old is New Again" feature, and we're changing the ground rules a little bit. As you no doubt surely recall, EOiNA was originally intended to be an ongoing series wherein we'd play classic games for the first time, and I started it off with a few entries regarding my very first playthrough of Final Fantasy 7. As it happens, I got stuck about 10 hours into the game (couldn't seem to get a chocobo, iirc), and then my 360 got back from the repair shop, and I returned my borrowed copy of FF7 to its rightful owner. (As FF7 is now available on the PSN, and my save files still work, I do expect to return to it at some point.)
That said, I'm resurrecting EOiNA because I've been (re)playing Uncharted for the last few days, and as it happens, I've got quite a few things I've gotta say about it. But let me set the scene first:
1. The wife and I have recently gotten sucked into Firefly, which we recently Netflix'd. We'd caught Serenity on some movie channel a little while ago and liked it very much and figured we ought to give the series a shot. And so while it's true that Captain Malcolm Reynolds has quite a bit in common with, say, Han Solo, he also bears more than a passing resemblance to good old Nathan Drake. So much so, in fact, that I double-checked Nathan Fillion's IMDB page to make sure he wasn't Drake's voice-actor. (I do not remember him being in Jade Empire, and I played that game twice.)
2. I haven't really done that much gaming on the ol' PS3 these days. Yes, I recently finished (and enjoyed) InFamous, but aside from the very occasional Trash Panic session, there really just hasn't been all that much to do. So I've been feeling neglectful.
3. Going into E3 this year, I had most of my attention squarely focused on a few selected titles, specifically Mass Effect 2, Brutal Legend, and The Beatles: Rock Band. (My affection for the original notwithstanding, my hopes were not very high for Bioshock 2, and that hasn't changed much.) And sure, the new Splinter Cell footage was pretty encouraging, and Assassin's Creed 2 turned a lot of heads. But when all was said and done, I came away from E3 2009 with Uncharted 2 at the very top of my wishlist. Even without the multiplayer, which I probably won't play very much of anyway, the single-player footage looked absolutely amazing, and reminded me of how much I enjoyed the first one.
And so here we are, in the doldrums of the summer release calendar. A perfect opportunity to revisit the original Uncharted, one of the brightest spots in the PS3's launch.
For the most part, the game is still excellent. The graphics are still lush and colorful, the environments are nicely varied, the platforming controls are still tight and intuitive, the pacing is just right, the story is engaging and remarkably well-written, with one of the better all-around voice cast ensemble performances of this (or any) generation...
...And, of course, the enemies are still relentless and bulletproof. For what at first glance appeared to be a prettied-up Tomb Raider clone, the game's ratio of combat-to-platforming is about 80:20, and it can get wearying at times, even on the Easy difficulty setting. You can pepper an enemy in the upper torso 3 or 4 times and they'll simply stagger about - headshots are the only way to really keep a guy down, and even then they don't always work. This was my single biggest complaint the first time around, and it hasn't changed this time, either - it's not uncommon to feel like you must be doing something wrong, that the rest of the game is so incredibly polished and so it must be that you're not shooting the bad guys in the head hard enough. It's great that the enemies are smart - they flank you and throw grenades and considering that you're heavily outnumbered, it's not a surprise that you die so often. I just wish the weapons felt a bit more powerful.
I wish I could say that it's worth a 2nd playthrough for the Trophies, but I don't really give a shit about the PS3's Trophy system. It's nice that I'm getting them, I guess, but the PS3's Trophy system is arcane and impossible to quantify. It's an added bonus if you care about it; I do not. It's to the game's immense credit, though, that it does not matter one bit.
That said, I'm resurrecting EOiNA because I've been (re)playing Uncharted for the last few days, and as it happens, I've got quite a few things I've gotta say about it. But let me set the scene first:
1. The wife and I have recently gotten sucked into Firefly, which we recently Netflix'd. We'd caught Serenity on some movie channel a little while ago and liked it very much and figured we ought to give the series a shot. And so while it's true that Captain Malcolm Reynolds has quite a bit in common with, say, Han Solo, he also bears more than a passing resemblance to good old Nathan Drake. So much so, in fact, that I double-checked Nathan Fillion's IMDB page to make sure he wasn't Drake's voice-actor. (I do not remember him being in Jade Empire, and I played that game twice.)
2. I haven't really done that much gaming on the ol' PS3 these days. Yes, I recently finished (and enjoyed) InFamous, but aside from the very occasional Trash Panic session, there really just hasn't been all that much to do. So I've been feeling neglectful.
3. Going into E3 this year, I had most of my attention squarely focused on a few selected titles, specifically Mass Effect 2, Brutal Legend, and The Beatles: Rock Band. (My affection for the original notwithstanding, my hopes were not very high for Bioshock 2, and that hasn't changed much.) And sure, the new Splinter Cell footage was pretty encouraging, and Assassin's Creed 2 turned a lot of heads. But when all was said and done, I came away from E3 2009 with Uncharted 2 at the very top of my wishlist. Even without the multiplayer, which I probably won't play very much of anyway, the single-player footage looked absolutely amazing, and reminded me of how much I enjoyed the first one.
And so here we are, in the doldrums of the summer release calendar. A perfect opportunity to revisit the original Uncharted, one of the brightest spots in the PS3's launch.
For the most part, the game is still excellent. The graphics are still lush and colorful, the environments are nicely varied, the platforming controls are still tight and intuitive, the pacing is just right, the story is engaging and remarkably well-written, with one of the better all-around voice cast ensemble performances of this (or any) generation...
...And, of course, the enemies are still relentless and bulletproof. For what at first glance appeared to be a prettied-up Tomb Raider clone, the game's ratio of combat-to-platforming is about 80:20, and it can get wearying at times, even on the Easy difficulty setting. You can pepper an enemy in the upper torso 3 or 4 times and they'll simply stagger about - headshots are the only way to really keep a guy down, and even then they don't always work. This was my single biggest complaint the first time around, and it hasn't changed this time, either - it's not uncommon to feel like you must be doing something wrong, that the rest of the game is so incredibly polished and so it must be that you're not shooting the bad guys in the head hard enough. It's great that the enemies are smart - they flank you and throw grenades and considering that you're heavily outnumbered, it's not a surprise that you die so often. I just wish the weapons felt a bit more powerful.
I wish I could say that it's worth a 2nd playthrough for the Trophies, but I don't really give a shit about the PS3's Trophy system. It's nice that I'm getting them, I guess, but the PS3's Trophy system is arcane and impossible to quantify. It's an added bonus if you care about it; I do not. It's to the game's immense credit, though, that it does not matter one bit.
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