OK, so. I had more or less written off the rest of 2010 in terms of "games to get excited about." And now, suddenly, I'm up to my ears in quality stuff.
Rock Band 3 is easily the best iteration of the franchise, and I say this even though I've only played one 14-song setlist with my wife, and without even owning the keyboard or trying out any of the "pro mode" stuff. I'm talking strictly nuts-and-bolts here; the game feels "smart." Being able to save a setlist is a fantastic idea, especially if you want to set something up ahead of time; having the game actually pause between songs is also something much appreciated, to give everyone a second to catch their breath, stretch their fingers, take a quick bathroom break. The stat-tracking is really interesting; it's keeping tabs on all sorts of cool stuff, which definitely scratches that "let me play one more tune so I can get the next achievement" itch. I've only seen a tiny fraction of what the game has to offer - I plan on messing with it A LOT over the weekend. And I still need to get familiar with the on-disc setlist; I've already merged my RB1, RB2 and DLC libraries, so I need to see what's actually new.
I can't quite tell if Fable 3 is the best iteration in its franchise; I'm maybe 30-40 minutes into it, and it basically feels like Fable 2 (which is not necessarily a bad thing, of course, as I very much enjoyed my time with F2). It does have some strange design choices, though, and I can already tell that some of them are going to get annoying.
For example: one of the bullet points of this franchise is that you can interact with anyone, and there's lots of ways to do that; so that's nice. Except here, if you want to interact with someone, you have to stand close enough to them that a button prompt appears; if you press the button, then the game momentarily stops, and then restarts with a new contextual button prompt; if you then press that button (shake hand, belch, etc.), then you're kicked back out into the first button prompt, and then you have to press another button to get back to the actual game. This is strange and needlessly cumbersome.
Also - the X button is both your melee attack and your block, which can be tricky, and the block really ought to have been mapped to one of the triggers, which are not used at all.
It's not really fair of me to criticize it just yet; again, I'm not even an hour into it, and there's so much more left to do. But every game's first impression goes a long way toward coloring your eventual verdict.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
so much candy
Here, let me blow the dust off of this blog and see if it's still working.
/kicks tires
OK!
Has it really been a month since the last update? That's just wrong. I'm trying to recall where the time went, exactly, or if there was some pressing reason why I've not been over here. Truth is, it's felt a little slow, games-wise. I've played several games to completion, and acquired an iPod Touch, and yet there hasn't really been anything that's made me say, "That does it, I'm blogging today." I'm writing today because, well, why not.
If my GoogleDoc is to be believed, here's what I've played since the last post, wherein I was obsessed with Civilization V.
I feel like I ought to start prepping for my year-end recap, although there are some notable titles left on my to-play list. I accidentally ordered the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas, and so I sent it back; I'd like to play it eventually, but I can wait until it gets patched. (And, frankly, I played a little Fallout 3 a few weeks ago just to check it out again, and that game feels positively ancient.) Fable 3 arrives tomorrow. I'm feeling aggressively ambivalent about Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, although I felt the same about AC2 and that game ended up being incredible. I need to play Kirby. I am curious about Star Wars: Force Unleashed 2, and I am unusually jazzed about the 360 version of NBA Jam. And I'd like to hope for the best for Epic Mickey.
And then I suppose I can get on with the recap.
/kicks tires
OK!
Has it really been a month since the last update? That's just wrong. I'm trying to recall where the time went, exactly, or if there was some pressing reason why I've not been over here. Truth is, it's felt a little slow, games-wise. I've played several games to completion, and acquired an iPod Touch, and yet there hasn't really been anything that's made me say, "That does it, I'm blogging today." I'm writing today because, well, why not.
If my GoogleDoc is to be believed, here's what I've played since the last post, wherein I was obsessed with Civilization V.
- DeathSpank 2: Thong of Virtue. In spite of the first game's faults (repetitive, mindless item fetching), I loved the hell out of it, and was eagerly looking forward to more. Sadly, this sequel suffers from a lot of I've been seeing this year, where it's basically more of the same, but it's no longer fresh or exciting. I finished it, but whereas I played the first game to 100% completion, I've still got a ton of side quests to do, and I don't care enough to do them.
- Dead Rising 2. I was hoping that the game had changed enough so that I could try to get through it; alas, I died about 20 minutes in and knew that I didn't have it in me. I understand why someone might get really into this franchise; the game is designed in a very specific, deliberate way that seems completely insane unless you submit to it, and I know that I don't have the patience to bother.
- Enslaved. This came out of nowhere to become one of my favorite titles of the year. I had a vicious headcold when this came out, and ended up spending my day of sick leave huddled up on my couch, plowing through it more or less in one go. Definitely reminded me of Uncharted 2, which is a great thing. Probably the best and most convincing facial animation I've ever seen - the relationship between the 2 lead characters is totally believable and real and palpable.
- Castlevania: LoS. Fuck this game. I'm not necessarily a Castlevania fanboy; I like the games, when they're good, but that's more or less it. That being said, there's nothing about this game (at least as far as I got) that has ANYTHING to do with the Castlevania franchise as I understand it. It is a God of War clone through and through, with frustrating controls and combat. It's true that it has a gorgeous graphics engine, but it's 2010 - if I can't have complete control over the camera, I get angry. Especially since the camera is, generally speaking, miles away from the action, making it difficult to see my dude; also, it's incredibly annoying when my dude gets hit by enemies that are off-screen, "under" the camera. I stopped midway through the "Lycan" area, and I'll tell you why: there's this one section where you have to tame this giant rat beast, which enables you to ride it and jump over huge gaps. I tamed the rat, jumped it over the gaps, and then got to this weird ledge area and couldn't seem to find anywhere to go, so I killed the rat. ONLY THEN did the game tell me that I needed the rat to climb up the suddenly-blinking vine. Which meant that I had to go back to the rat-taming arena, which was suddenly easy to do since all the gaps were jumpable by my puny human legs. This means that the game specifically intended me to have to do this fucking thing twice. Fuck this game.
- Costume Quest. I just finished this over the weekend, actually. It pains me to say this, but Double Fine has not yet made a truly great game. They make incredible worlds, with great characters speaking hilarious dialogue, and they tell great stories, but the game part is the part that can feel like the last thing they thought of. CQ gets past this by at least being relatively short, which makes the repetitive RPG-lite combat not terribly annoying. And the rest of the game is relentlessly charming and adorable and laugh-out-loud funny. I especially loved the Arrested Development reference in the 3rd act.
- Super Meat Boy. It is doubtful that I will ever finish this game, as it is beastly difficult. But it's also fiendishly addictive.
I feel like I ought to start prepping for my year-end recap, although there are some notable titles left on my to-play list. I accidentally ordered the PS3 version of Fallout: New Vegas, and so I sent it back; I'd like to play it eventually, but I can wait until it gets patched. (And, frankly, I played a little Fallout 3 a few weeks ago just to check it out again, and that game feels positively ancient.) Fable 3 arrives tomorrow. I'm feeling aggressively ambivalent about Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, although I felt the same about AC2 and that game ended up being incredible. I need to play Kirby. I am curious about Star Wars: Force Unleashed 2, and I am unusually jazzed about the 360 version of NBA Jam. And I'd like to hope for the best for Epic Mickey.
And then I suppose I can get on with the recap.
Thursday, September 23, 2010
Surrender
I apologize in advance if this post makes less sense than usual. I was up until 2am playing Civ V.
---------------
But first, let me get Professor Layton and the Unwound Future out of the way.
I still have a fondness for the Professor Layton games, although it's mostly because they remind me that I own a DS, and I still have a fondness for the DS, because once upon a time it was a kickass handheld gaming machine that had tons of cool games coming out for it all the time.
Still, though, the first Professor Layton game was charming and witty and unique, and while it may have had one (or ten) too many matchstick puzzles, it was still an enjoyable experience. The second game was good, too, in a competent sort of way - in a way, it kinda reminds me of Bioshock 2, in that PL2 and B2 are technically better than their original games in terms of UI improvements and mechanics, and yet somehow not nearly as charming or as fun. PL2 in particular had one of the most bat-shit crazy stories I can remember, which added to my sense of disconnection - the whole game is about solving puzzles, and yet you as the player are never given a chance to solve the fundamental mystery of the story; it seems as if it was pulled out of thin air.
This same problem is in PL3; the big reveal is completely ludicrous and borderline nonsensical, and you are never given a chance to actually figure it out for yourself - nor could you even guess, because it has literally nothing to do with anything you've already spent the last 10 hours dealing with.
But whatever - you don't play the Professor Layton games for the story, right? You play them for the puzzles. And here, the puzzles are very much hit or miss, and more often than not they feel unfair, in that they're written unclearly, or misleadingly, or simply do not make any sense. I ultimately used a walkthrough to finish the game, which makes the entire experience pointless.
And not only that, but the puzzles don't take advantage of the DS nearly as much as they ought to. Which is odd, because sometimes they do. Let me explain. There are a few puzzles which are fully interactive - the one I'm thinking of in particular is where a piece of paper has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to piece them back together in order to find a secret code. And the game lets you manipulate those pieces with the stylus - it's like a jigsaw puzzle. Whereas there are other puzzles, featuring the same exact concept - a photograph of the end of a race has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to figure out who came in third place - but you can't manipulate the pieces. It seems odd and unnecessarily difficult.
Here's what I'd like to see in a future PL title - I'd like the whole game to turn into a point-and-click adventure, with puzzles thrown in. I'd like to take some ownership in how the story actually unfolds. The puzzles don't necessarily have to make sense in the context of the story (after all, they certainly don't right now), but I'd like the whole process to be a little more involving than simply going from screen to screen and clicking on random people and getting nonsensical puzzles thrown at me. And I'd especially like it if I, as the player, were given a genuine opportunity to solve the grand story for myself, instead of having some crazy deus ex machina do it for me. Otherwise, why bother with a story at all, if it's never going to make any sense?
------------------
Back to Civ V.
So last night I finished my first campaign; my Roman armies were beating the shit out of France until, inevitably, they surrendered.
My initial impression of Civ V is probably not all that relevant to the hard-core Civ fan; I was introduced to the series through Civ Rev, which I promptly fell in love with and played on both the 360 and the DS. Shortly thereafter, Steam probably had a sale on Civ IV, and I played with that for a bit, though eventually I fell back to the Civ Rev version.
Civ V is, to my noob eyes, a perfect mashup of the two. It's got insanely deep systems and tech trees and whatnot, but it's also incredibly approachable and accessible and you don't have to micro-manage if you don't want to. It took me about 70 turns to realize that I could automate my workers, which, looking back, was the right time for me to figure that out - that was around the point where the game started to evolve from simply settling and developing cities into building units and wonders and technologies. I didn't start the game with a desired outcome; I simply built my empire as big as I could, keeping all of my bases covered - in fact, if anything, I eventually decided I'd get a cultural victory - but I soon realized that I was miles and miles ahead of France, which was the only empire left on the continent, and I could probably just send a few rocket artillery units over and raze their cities without too much fuss, and that's exactly what ended up happening.
It is, indeed, a time suck. I haven't stayed up that late on a school night in years, and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so. I figured I'd play up until the 1400s or so and then come back to it later, but soon "one more turn" turned into "well, let's just finish this particular Wonder", and that turned into "OK, let's build some rockets," and ultimately Paris fell, and I rejoiced in my victory, and then fell dead asleep.
---------------
But first, let me get Professor Layton and the Unwound Future out of the way.
I still have a fondness for the Professor Layton games, although it's mostly because they remind me that I own a DS, and I still have a fondness for the DS, because once upon a time it was a kickass handheld gaming machine that had tons of cool games coming out for it all the time.
Still, though, the first Professor Layton game was charming and witty and unique, and while it may have had one (or ten) too many matchstick puzzles, it was still an enjoyable experience. The second game was good, too, in a competent sort of way - in a way, it kinda reminds me of Bioshock 2, in that PL2 and B2 are technically better than their original games in terms of UI improvements and mechanics, and yet somehow not nearly as charming or as fun. PL2 in particular had one of the most bat-shit crazy stories I can remember, which added to my sense of disconnection - the whole game is about solving puzzles, and yet you as the player are never given a chance to solve the fundamental mystery of the story; it seems as if it was pulled out of thin air.
This same problem is in PL3; the big reveal is completely ludicrous and borderline nonsensical, and you are never given a chance to actually figure it out for yourself - nor could you even guess, because it has literally nothing to do with anything you've already spent the last 10 hours dealing with.
But whatever - you don't play the Professor Layton games for the story, right? You play them for the puzzles. And here, the puzzles are very much hit or miss, and more often than not they feel unfair, in that they're written unclearly, or misleadingly, or simply do not make any sense. I ultimately used a walkthrough to finish the game, which makes the entire experience pointless.
And not only that, but the puzzles don't take advantage of the DS nearly as much as they ought to. Which is odd, because sometimes they do. Let me explain. There are a few puzzles which are fully interactive - the one I'm thinking of in particular is where a piece of paper has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to piece them back together in order to find a secret code. And the game lets you manipulate those pieces with the stylus - it's like a jigsaw puzzle. Whereas there are other puzzles, featuring the same exact concept - a photograph of the end of a race has been ripped up into pieces, and you need to figure out who came in third place - but you can't manipulate the pieces. It seems odd and unnecessarily difficult.
Here's what I'd like to see in a future PL title - I'd like the whole game to turn into a point-and-click adventure, with puzzles thrown in. I'd like to take some ownership in how the story actually unfolds. The puzzles don't necessarily have to make sense in the context of the story (after all, they certainly don't right now), but I'd like the whole process to be a little more involving than simply going from screen to screen and clicking on random people and getting nonsensical puzzles thrown at me. And I'd especially like it if I, as the player, were given a genuine opportunity to solve the grand story for myself, instead of having some crazy deus ex machina do it for me. Otherwise, why bother with a story at all, if it's never going to make any sense?
------------------
Back to Civ V.
So last night I finished my first campaign; my Roman armies were beating the shit out of France until, inevitably, they surrendered.
My initial impression of Civ V is probably not all that relevant to the hard-core Civ fan; I was introduced to the series through Civ Rev, which I promptly fell in love with and played on both the 360 and the DS. Shortly thereafter, Steam probably had a sale on Civ IV, and I played with that for a bit, though eventually I fell back to the Civ Rev version.
Civ V is, to my noob eyes, a perfect mashup of the two. It's got insanely deep systems and tech trees and whatnot, but it's also incredibly approachable and accessible and you don't have to micro-manage if you don't want to. It took me about 70 turns to realize that I could automate my workers, which, looking back, was the right time for me to figure that out - that was around the point where the game started to evolve from simply settling and developing cities into building units and wonders and technologies. I didn't start the game with a desired outcome; I simply built my empire as big as I could, keeping all of my bases covered - in fact, if anything, I eventually decided I'd get a cultural victory - but I soon realized that I was miles and miles ahead of France, which was the only empire left on the continent, and I could probably just send a few rocket artillery units over and raze their cities without too much fuss, and that's exactly what ended up happening.
It is, indeed, a time suck. I haven't stayed up that late on a school night in years, and it certainly wasn't my intention to do so. I figured I'd play up until the 1400s or so and then come back to it later, but soon "one more turn" turned into "well, let's just finish this particular Wonder", and that turned into "OK, let's build some rockets," and ultimately Paris fell, and I rejoiced in my victory, and then fell dead asleep.
Monday, September 20, 2010
You can guess where this is going
Knights of Columbus, this is going to be difficult.
I am currently a beta tester for an upcoming, big-deal product that will be launching later this year. I'm not entirely sure how I was able to secure that gig, but I'm not complaining; it's as close as I will most likely ever get to being in the videogame industry, and so I'm taking it pretty seriously.
Now, you can imagine that something this big-deal would come with a strict NDA, and you'd be right. That hasn't stopped other people from uploading YouTube videos, of course, but - as I said earlier - I'm taking this pretty seriously, and so I've been biting my tongue.
Even so, there's only so much of this silence that I can take.
Can you bear with me? Can you muster enough patience to get through this with me?
Then know this: it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty neat.
------------------
I've listened to a bunch of gaming podcasts regarding ________, and read any number of "hands-on" previews, and they all generally say the same thing: ________ is not for the hard-core. These previewers make no bones about their negative bias going in, and nothing they see convinces them otherwise. (It's perhaps a little unfortunate that the enthusiast press is so clearly lacking in objectivity, but it's not like this is the first time that this kind of thing has happened.) The larger issue, though, is that they all seem to miss the point: ________ is not a product that was ever intended for the hard-core. ________ is meant to get the non-gamer involved.
Of course, the problem is convincing a non-gamer to buy this thing in the first place. I would imagine that a lot of ________'s sales are going to be from people like me - we'll buy it so that our wives and children and other non-gaming friends will get involved and enjoy it. And so I recognize the angle that the press is taking here - is there enough value in ________ to justify a purchase in the first place? Will there be any residual enjoyment after the non-gamer in the household is finished? Can it ever appeal to the hard-core crowd?
Lest we get sidetracked here into an unnecessary discussion of what exactly constitutes "hard-core", let me answer the more relevant questions: Yes, it works (although it's not yet perfect), and yes, it's fun (but mostly when the game itself is fun, too). And yes, the non-gamers who have come over to the apartment have been gob-smacked, which is probably the reaction that the makers of ________ were hoping for.
The most recent update to the ________ software includes one of the titles that got my wife's immediate attention when we watched some of this year's E3 coverage, and that's the one that we ended up showing off to our guests this weekend. And they loved it. They even loved just messing around with it, in between actual games - they loved seeing a 1-to-1 reaction between themselves and their avatars. They loved seeing how, when my wife and I moved back into the playing area, ________ recognized us and changed our on-screen appearances accordingly. It's the best thing to use ________ by a long shot, and it's the one that really shows off ________'s potential, even if it's ultimately just a really good-looking proof-of-concept showpiece. The biggest downside to the ________ software so far is the tendency towards laggy sensitivity, but this specific game seems to have conquered that problem. It's breathtaking.
And there's more to ________ than the software. I'm not really at liberty to explain just what kind of testing I did yesterday, but there were hints that the ________ interface will work with various components and applications on the master machine, which would be pretty neat. (It's more than a little ironic, actually - part of the appeal of ________ is its whole "get off the couch" nature, and yet some of the non-gaming functionality actually ends up meaning that you can stay on the couch, and not even have to press any buttons.)
Hmm. I'm sure that I've said a lot more than I'm allowed to say, so I'll stop, even though there's a lot more that I want to talk about. The short version, though, is that it's got some serious potential, and I'm very curious to see what happens next.
I am currently a beta tester for an upcoming, big-deal product that will be launching later this year. I'm not entirely sure how I was able to secure that gig, but I'm not complaining; it's as close as I will most likely ever get to being in the videogame industry, and so I'm taking it pretty seriously.
Now, you can imagine that something this big-deal would come with a strict NDA, and you'd be right. That hasn't stopped other people from uploading YouTube videos, of course, but - as I said earlier - I'm taking this pretty seriously, and so I've been biting my tongue.
Even so, there's only so much of this silence that I can take.
Can you bear with me? Can you muster enough patience to get through this with me?
Then know this: it's not perfect, but it's actually pretty neat.
------------------
I've listened to a bunch of gaming podcasts regarding ________, and read any number of "hands-on" previews, and they all generally say the same thing: ________ is not for the hard-core. These previewers make no bones about their negative bias going in, and nothing they see convinces them otherwise. (It's perhaps a little unfortunate that the enthusiast press is so clearly lacking in objectivity, but it's not like this is the first time that this kind of thing has happened.) The larger issue, though, is that they all seem to miss the point: ________ is not a product that was ever intended for the hard-core. ________ is meant to get the non-gamer involved.
Of course, the problem is convincing a non-gamer to buy this thing in the first place. I would imagine that a lot of ________'s sales are going to be from people like me - we'll buy it so that our wives and children and other non-gaming friends will get involved and enjoy it. And so I recognize the angle that the press is taking here - is there enough value in ________ to justify a purchase in the first place? Will there be any residual enjoyment after the non-gamer in the household is finished? Can it ever appeal to the hard-core crowd?
Lest we get sidetracked here into an unnecessary discussion of what exactly constitutes "hard-core", let me answer the more relevant questions: Yes, it works (although it's not yet perfect), and yes, it's fun (but mostly when the game itself is fun, too). And yes, the non-gamers who have come over to the apartment have been gob-smacked, which is probably the reaction that the makers of ________ were hoping for.The most recent update to the ________ software includes one of the titles that got my wife's immediate attention when we watched some of this year's E3 coverage, and that's the one that we ended up showing off to our guests this weekend. And they loved it. They even loved just messing around with it, in between actual games - they loved seeing a 1-to-1 reaction between themselves and their avatars. They loved seeing how, when my wife and I moved back into the playing area, ________ recognized us and changed our on-screen appearances accordingly. It's the best thing to use ________ by a long shot, and it's the one that really shows off ________'s potential, even if it's ultimately just a really good-looking proof-of-concept showpiece. The biggest downside to the ________ software so far is the tendency towards laggy sensitivity, but this specific game seems to have conquered that problem. It's breathtaking.
And there's more to ________ than the software. I'm not really at liberty to explain just what kind of testing I did yesterday, but there were hints that the ________ interface will work with various components and applications on the master machine, which would be pretty neat. (It's more than a little ironic, actually - part of the appeal of ________ is its whole "get off the couch" nature, and yet some of the non-gaming functionality actually ends up meaning that you can stay on the couch, and not even have to press any buttons.)
Hmm. I'm sure that I've said a lot more than I'm allowed to say, so I'll stop, even though there's a lot more that I want to talk about. The short version, though, is that it's got some serious potential, and I'm very curious to see what happens next.
Reaching
The title of this blog is "Shouts from the Couch," but I've not been particularly angry lately. In fact, if anything, the title now feels like it comes from a lazy couch potato who requires immediate assistance in reaching the bowl of onion dip that lies just out of arm's reach.
Speaking of reach, I finished the Halo Reach campaign on Friday, and have now officially dipped my toes into the sordid world of multiplayer. And as much as it hurts me to admit, I must say: I am enjoying the mulitplayer immensely. I've even won a few matches! (Only a few.) I'm never going to be very good at Halo; indeed, most of the time I'm just barely competent. But they've got so much to do in there that it borders on the absurd. Most importantly, their matchmaking search criteria is fantastic this time around; I've only played 12 matches thus far, but I've yet to run into any racist assholes, and for the most part I've never felt like I was playing with people a million times better than me - which is to say that I've got noone to blame for my failure besides myself. Which is just the way I like it. And the new Points system is a fantastic incentive to keep playing, which is odd, considering that the only thing you can do with your accumulated points is to buy purely cosmetic changes to your armor, which you can't even see.
I think my problem with the Halo franchise is that because I've never been interested in the multiplayer, I've really only been able to base my opinion on each product on the strength of its campaign, and let's face it - their campaigns are all pretty stupid. Reach is certainly paced well enough, and the enemy A.I. is quite devious at times and there are lots of memorable set pieces, but by and large the story is forgettable, the characters are interchangeable and hard to root for, and I frequently lost track of why I was going from point A to point B. There's almost no backtracking in Reach, at least, so chalk that one up as a small victory.
And it definitely looks good. Great, even. Definitely the best-looking Halo game yet. But it's definitely not the best-looking game on the 360, not by a long shot. It's not necessarily a knock - it doesn't look bad - but there's a reason why everyone licenses the Unreal engine, and why nobody licenses the Halo engine.
It's almost a shame that Civ V comes out tomorrow; I'd really like to keep playing Halo. And that's something I'd never think I'd ever say.
Speaking of reach, I finished the Halo Reach campaign on Friday, and have now officially dipped my toes into the sordid world of multiplayer. And as much as it hurts me to admit, I must say: I am enjoying the mulitplayer immensely. I've even won a few matches! (Only a few.) I'm never going to be very good at Halo; indeed, most of the time I'm just barely competent. But they've got so much to do in there that it borders on the absurd. Most importantly, their matchmaking search criteria is fantastic this time around; I've only played 12 matches thus far, but I've yet to run into any racist assholes, and for the most part I've never felt like I was playing with people a million times better than me - which is to say that I've got noone to blame for my failure besides myself. Which is just the way I like it. And the new Points system is a fantastic incentive to keep playing, which is odd, considering that the only thing you can do with your accumulated points is to buy purely cosmetic changes to your armor, which you can't even see.
And it definitely looks good. Great, even. Definitely the best-looking Halo game yet. But it's definitely not the best-looking game on the 360, not by a long shot. It's not necessarily a knock - it doesn't look bad - but there's a reason why everyone licenses the Unreal engine, and why nobody licenses the Halo engine.
It's almost a shame that Civ V comes out tomorrow; I'd really like to keep playing Halo. And that's something I'd never think I'd ever say.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
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:
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?
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.
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?
Monday, August 9, 2010
Strategery
My relationship with real-time strategy games was, for a time, very much like my relationship with vegetables; I shunned them at all costs. Well, to be fair, I never had much of an opportunity to even play RTS games; my PCs were never robust enough, and anyway if I was ever gaming on my computer it was generally for Quake 2.
This all changed, though, when I played Civilization: Revolution. I'd never played any of Sid Meier's games until the Xbox version of Pirates!, which I adored, and I figured that CivRev would be a good introduction to the Civ experience, however dumbed down it may have been. (My understanding is that the Civ games aren't even really RTS games, but more like their own specific thing, but the overall principle is somewhat similar.) Anyway, I got hooked on the 360 version of CivRev, and then I bought it for my DS, and then I splurged on Civ4 for my PC, and even though I really only played one game, I loved it.
So, then, I'm really looking forward to Civ 5. So much so that I got back into CivRev this weekend, and then, when I kept failing miserably at gaining a military victory with the Germans (you'd think that would be a slam dunk), I remembered that old 360 Arcade title, most notable for being the first In-Avatar game, A Kingdom for Keflings. K4K is kind of a weird cross of CivRev and Farmville? There aren't any enemies, and nothing can really go wrong; you just need to keep building various buildings and growing your city, and eventually it gets pretty hectic because you have 30 little dudes running around, say, chopping down trees and then delivering them to lumbermills, and then delivering the newly-crafted planks of wood to other workshops, etc. Anyway, it's incredibly charming and the music is great (even if a bit repetitive) and I found myself getting totally sucked in. And in these dry, dry summer months, you take what you can get.
But there's this other RTS game that just came out, and it seems to be causing a bit of a fuss; and yet I still feel a bit intimidated. In the wake of CivRev, I tried a handful of 360 RTS titles, and they all made me feel incredibly stupid. But I am a grown man now, and if I can eventually grow to enjoy vegetables, perhaps I can eventually learn how to not totally suck at Starcraft 2.
Not bloody likely, though, if the first few missions are any indication. As much as it bends over backwards to remain accessible, I still feel so very stupid. I want to move all my guys at the same time, but they don't all stay together. I want them to attack everything in their path as they move from point A to point B - and there's a button that specifically makes that happen - and I keep forgetting to push it. If there's a resource thing on the way, I suddenly forget how to activate it or make it work or whatever. It is humbling. It is clearly a well-made game, and the way people are freaking out about it leads me to believe that there is gold to be found, if I am willing and patient enough to figure out how to sift for it. I remain cautiously skeptical.
This all changed, though, when I played Civilization: Revolution. I'd never played any of Sid Meier's games until the Xbox version of Pirates!, which I adored, and I figured that CivRev would be a good introduction to the Civ experience, however dumbed down it may have been. (My understanding is that the Civ games aren't even really RTS games, but more like their own specific thing, but the overall principle is somewhat similar.) Anyway, I got hooked on the 360 version of CivRev, and then I bought it for my DS, and then I splurged on Civ4 for my PC, and even though I really only played one game, I loved it.
So, then, I'm really looking forward to Civ 5. So much so that I got back into CivRev this weekend, and then, when I kept failing miserably at gaining a military victory with the Germans (you'd think that would be a slam dunk), I remembered that old 360 Arcade title, most notable for being the first In-Avatar game, A Kingdom for Keflings. K4K is kind of a weird cross of CivRev and Farmville? There aren't any enemies, and nothing can really go wrong; you just need to keep building various buildings and growing your city, and eventually it gets pretty hectic because you have 30 little dudes running around, say, chopping down trees and then delivering them to lumbermills, and then delivering the newly-crafted planks of wood to other workshops, etc. Anyway, it's incredibly charming and the music is great (even if a bit repetitive) and I found myself getting totally sucked in. And in these dry, dry summer months, you take what you can get.
But there's this other RTS game that just came out, and it seems to be causing a bit of a fuss; and yet I still feel a bit intimidated. In the wake of CivRev, I tried a handful of 360 RTS titles, and they all made me feel incredibly stupid. But I am a grown man now, and if I can eventually grow to enjoy vegetables, perhaps I can eventually learn how to not totally suck at Starcraft 2.
Not bloody likely, though, if the first few missions are any indication. As much as it bends over backwards to remain accessible, I still feel so very stupid. I want to move all my guys at the same time, but they don't all stay together. I want them to attack everything in their path as they move from point A to point B - and there's a button that specifically makes that happen - and I keep forgetting to push it. If there's a resource thing on the way, I suddenly forget how to activate it or make it work or whatever. It is humbling. It is clearly a well-made game, and the way people are freaking out about it leads me to believe that there is gold to be found, if I am willing and patient enough to figure out how to sift for it. I remain cautiously skeptical.
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