Weekend Recap: the holiday that wasn't

If all had gone according to plan, this post wouldn't exist.  The plan was to leave Thursday morning to go up to my dad's house for Thanksgiving, and to eventually return to the apartment on Saturday night, and Sunday would be a day of holiday decorating and football.  Instead, my wife had the flu and I had a nagging head cold, and we stayed home.  And so I played a lot of video games. 

In list form, in descending order of time played:

• finished Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood
• got a few hours into Gran Turismo 5
• kept dabbling in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
• went and bought Burnout Paradise on the PC thanks to yet another ridiculous Steam sale and got back into it very, very quickly
• Train Conductor 1/2 on the iPhone is insanely addictive
• played 2 games of NBA JAM HD with my brother, for old time's sake
  
• and some Pinball FX2 with the wife.

I will give AssBro a more thorough examination later, once I've had a bit more coffee.  But I can say, now, that I think it's the best game in the franchise, and it will most likely wind up at #3 in my Top 10 of 2010. 

As for GT5; I'll be the first person to admit that what I know about cars could be inscribed on the rim of a shot glass with a dull Sharpie.  But I really love driving games, strangely enough, and while I tend to prefer crazy, insanely fast stuff like Burnout, I have been known to get sucked into a Forza game for hours and hours.  (I do have an aversion to NASCAR, though, which is probably similar to my aversion to country music and the tea party movement.)  I needed to see what GT5 was all about for several reasons:

1. I haven't played a game on my PS3 since I finished FF13;
2. The last time I played a GT game was on my friend's PS1;
3. I am a graphics whore (which reminds me, at some point I need to talk about this fascinating article, which I got from the lovely and talented Caro), and if there's one thing that the GT franchise is famous for, it's graphics; 
4. I loved the hell out of Forza 3, and felt obligated to see if GT5 was better; and
5. After 5 years of development and endless delays, the curiosity was killing me.

After 2 hours of playtime, here's what I can say about GT5.

1. It's prettier than Forza 3, generally.  I've read lots of people who have been complaining about how horrible some of the cars look; to my eyes, it looks great.  It's worth finishing a race in last place just so that you can watch the pretty, pretty replays, which are utterly convincing and gorgeous.  Some people complain that it's bland; I've only been on a few tracks, and driven a handful of cars, so I can't quite speak to that.  One could maybe argue that it's a little sterile, or perhaps a little too pristine.  
2. Is it as fun as Forza 3, though?  Not sure.  It's certainly more accessible than I was expecting it to be, but that's relative - when you're buying a new (or used) car, the game doesn't tell you what the car's Top Speed is.  When you're like me and know nothing of horsepower and weight and acceleration, not giving out a car's Top Speed is basically a slap in the dick, and I ended up losing a ton of races because I had unwittingly bought the wrong car.
3. Further to that last point, the game doesn't really dole out new cars and rewards the way Forza does.  I'm still only in the beginner tier of races in the career and at least half of the events I'm looking at require vehicles that I don't have, and I'll have to retry events I've already won just to earn enough coin to afford an applicable vehicle - a vehicle that I'll probably only drive once or twice until I get something better.  Seems odd.
4. I haven't raced online, but the fact that the game's single-player campaign was so horribly fucked up because too many people were crushing the game's servers is absolutely unforgivable, especially for a game of this magnitude.  And if the game's developer is telling you to pull your PS3 offline so that you can play single-player without running into problems, that's just absurd.  PlayStation fanboys love talking shit about Xbox Live and how you have to pay for it when PSN is free, but file this under "You Get What You Pay For" as Exhibit 375. 

I remain intrigued, though, and there's so much content that it's sure to get me through the winter.  Although I may pull out Forza 3 again, just to compare/contrast.  My gut reaction right now, though, is that Forza feels more generous and accessible; GT5 feels more authoritative and legitimate. 

I was really looking forward to NBA JAM HD, and when my brother came over we finally got to try it out.  My brother had a Sega Genesis as a kid and we played NBA JAM endlessly.  The new game basically feels like the old game, which is great.  The problem is that it's really meant to be played with someone sitting next to you on the couch, and my brother lives in DC (and doesn't own an Xbox).  So, while it's tremendous fun in the right conditions, it seems pointless on its own.  I felt a little sad sending it back to Gamefly, but it is what it is.

AssBro final thoughts will go up either later today or tomorrow.

The Path

This is a link to Joystiq's not-review of The Path. I read this not-review this afternoon and felt compelled to check it out; I've just played a little bit of it and I can pretty much concur. It's not a game as much as it is a surreal, dream-like experience. It's also seemingly taxing my PC, which seems odd; I had to turn down a lot of the graphical bizness in order to maintain a decent, still-choppy framerate.

If you have $10 and an open mind, there are worse ways you could spend a few hours.

Goodbye 2008

Some random ramblings as I fill in the idle hours at work on the last day of the year:

Was listening to the Giant Bomb "Game of the Year" podcast on the way into work this morning, and it suddenly hit me - I played (and liked) every game they talked about. In years past, there would always be a few titles that would be totally alien to me, and I felt like I missing out; missing Super Mario Galaxy in 2007 would be a good example of that. But not this year - this year I was on top of everything.

I think I may have completed my Best Games of 2008 entry a bit prematurely - I've been playing the hell out of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts over the last week or so, and I'm pretty sure I love it. It could be argued that 2008 was really the break-out year for user-generated content, what with Little Big Planet and Spore (oh, yeah, I downloaded Spore because Steam had that stupid holiday sale), but BK:N&B really does it right, in that it gives you some sort of focus and a specific task. Spore's creature creator is certainly a fun toy to play with, but ultimately the design of your creature doesn't necessarily have any practical, tangible result (at least not in my somewhat limited experience with it); and on the other hand, Little Big Planet lets you do so much that it's a bit overwhelming - I've barely even touched the tutorials, because I have no idea what I'd want to create. Nuts & Bolts, on the other hand, does a fantastic job of giving you a specific goal, and giving you the tools to achieve it. Whether you build something totally from scratch or if you simply opt to tweak stuff you already have (which is my preferred method right now), it is immensely satisfying to complete a challenge entirely because of your own ingenuity.

Regarding Spore - yeah, I am a whore. Steam's holiday sale was as good a reason as any to dip my toe into the Spore experience. I've only gotten a little bit into the 2nd evolutionary stage - the one where you emerge from the slime and start walking around - so there's not a tremendous amount for me to discuss. My computer is getting a bit old, too, so I start to get some serious frame rate hitches every once in a while, which is a drag. It's an interesting enough diversion, at any rate; I've yet to see if it really holds together as a game.

I played an awful lot of Fallout 3 over the break, as well; that game continues to astound and amaze. The stories in that game are top-notch, probably second only to GTA4 this year. My only real problem with that game is the engine; talking to NPCs is still just a little bit weird enough to pull me out of the experience, and it was the same thing in Oblivion. I'm about halfway to level 15 right now, though, and I think I might hold off for a bit until some of the DLC arrives and they lift the level cap.

Speaking of RPGs, I've also been playing Chrono Trigger before I go to bed lately. It's a pretty solid game, and I can see why people love it. (I'm a little lost at the moment, though; I kinda rushed through the dialogue at the end of this one section and so now I'm not entirely sure where I'm supposed to be or what I'm supposed to be doing, and there's no real way (short of a walkthrough) of solving that problem.) But I'm starting to have a problem with calling these sorts of games "role-playing games." Fallout is a role-playing game; you inhabit your character and you can make choices and design your skillset and really play the way you want to play and have the experience you want to experience. However, in Chrono Trigger - and, indeed, in every JRPG I've ever played - all you do is level up and give your dude new and better gear. There's no real choice involved; the story is linear and your little dude will play the same way at the end of the game as he will in the beginning. We need some new sort of nomenclature.

My wife and I hosted 2 parties this December - my birthday, and Christmas - and Rock Band 2 was featured prominently at both. Goddamn that game is fun. I love watching people figure out how to play the drums almost as much as I love actually playing them; at first they're overwhelmed with all the information that's hurtling towards them at breakneck speeds, but then they figure out how to translate all that arcane symbology into recongizable rhythm, and then the whole concept opens up for them like a flower. It's really quite something to see.

Finally, I did the math, and barring some gaming tonight before the ball drops, I will have accumulated 12,060 Points in 2008. I will make no predictions about my point-whoring desires for 2009, other than I'd like to cross 50,000 in a cool way. I crossed 30K by playing Call of Duty 4 on a hard difficulty level, and I crossed 40K by playing the guitar on expert difficulty in Rock Band 2. Maybe I'll cross 50K by doing something awesome in Brutal Legend?

Oh great

Spore is available on Steam.

FUCK.

Back To The Apocalypse

I find it hard to believe that it's really December 19. The year was already moving pretty fast, and now I look up and see that Christmas is next fucking week. What the hell happened?

In any event, the release calendar madness has finally slowed down, and now I find myself with a bunch of titles that I finally have some time to enjoy.

First and foremost, I'm getting back into Fallout 3. I had put it down a few weeks ago for some reason, and when I heard about the forthcoming packages of DLC - one of which would raise the level cap and make the endgame a bit more productive - I felt like my time with the game would be better spent with all that stuff intact, instead of playing it now, finishing it, and then coming back later. (I had originally meant to talk about this very thing in relation to this particular article from MTV Multiplayer.) And I guess there's a part of me that still does feel that way; I'd like to be able to seamlessly incorporate this new DLC into my Fallout experience. That said, last night I found myself with an empty apartment and a lot of options, and I found myself missing the Fallout experience.

Goddamn, that game is awesome. I believe I said in my 2008 wrap-up that I thought I might be a little intimidated by it; it's such a huge world and there's so much to do and I still haven't totally figured out how good or evil I want to be, even though I'm level 10 and have put in a considerable amount of hours into it already. I put it in last night and it only took me about 30 seconds to remember how it worked and I was immediately hooked, again. I'm trying to stay away from the main quest, and as a result I've found a ton of other things to see and explore. I used to do this thing in Oblivion - if I was walking towards my targeted location, and another random, undiscovered location started to appear in my map, I'd always feel compelled to stray away just far enough to see what it was that I'd found, and I find myself doing the same thing here in Fallout. And it's really incredible to see what Bethesda has crammed in there. I'm currently on a side mission that's taken me to some pretty awesome locations, and the level of detail in every room is just staggering, and it boggles my mind to think that if I had only made a left turn in Rivet City instead of a right, I would never have seen any of it. And the thing of it is, I'm already well aware that there's a ton of stuff that I've already missed because I went one way and not the other. Absolutely incredible.

Rock Band 2 continues to be a nightly source of amusement at my house; my wife has finally graduated to "Medium" difficulty on guitar, and we're getting back into Tour mode again. I made a brief mention of this in the 2008 Year In Music post on my other blog; there's 2 songs in particular that I found in the store that I've totally fallen in love with, and I ended up purchasing those songs in iTunes - Maximo Park's "Girls Who Play Guitars" and Silversun Pickups' "Lazy Eye." They're both fun as hell to play on drums, but they also just kick a lot of ass in general.

I made a special category in my 2008 Year in Games post so as to congratulate myself for not being a total whore and buying the Strongbad Games, even though I'm a big fan of the cartoon and an even bigger fan of point-and-click adventure games. Then, of course, it was announced just the other day that they were releasing all 5 adventures on Steam, and so OF COURSE I went and downloaded them immediately. Steam was acting a little weird last night, though, and I couldn't actually open Episode 1. But I did check out the tutorial in Episode 5, just to make sure I knew what I was getting into, and of course I'm totally fucking hooked.

I finally beat the single-player campaign in Little Big Planet, and then I started dabbling in user-created levels, most of which are kinda shitty. (It does sound strange to use the phrase "single-player campaign" for a game like LBP, but to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, you use the nomenclature you have.) I'm not sure I'm ready to begin designing my own levels just yet; I may end up going back into the single-player to try and find all the stickers and objects that I didn't get the first time. I gotta say - even though the controls are awfully floaty and the back-middle-front aspect of it can get terribly screwed up, that game's charm is absolutely impossible to deny. I am fully on board the Sackboy bandwagon.

Finally, my DS is finally starting to come to life again. I've been getting into Chrono Trigger a little more, and I've also been enjoying the newest Castlevania game. I find it incredible that Konami has basically been making the same Castlevania game for a million years and yet it still ends up being pretty awesome every single time.

And so what are you playing this weekend?