Adventures in Lolly - gagging

Morning In Kamurocho

2011-03-22T13:15:00.001-05:00

Spending my morning drinking coffee and hanging out in Tokyo's red-light district. Yakuza 4 is treating me right.

I love this trailer.
(The video is borrowed from www.giantbomb.com.)

Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 Vs. Frustration Vs. Satisfaction

2011-03-04T13:10:00.002-06:00

EXTREME!!!

Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds is a game in which every single element is extreme. I don't mean Mountain Dew, X-Games kind of "eXtreme," although it has a nerdier kind of that in it too. It's extremity is more than just attitude or tone. This isn't a fighting game that decided to dial up it's crazy to eleven, it's a fighting game that decided to dial everything up to nine-hundred and ninety-nine, a game in which everything should be in italics all the time.

"Your game has only one on one fighting?" MVC3 asks. "Ours has three on three with multiple choice assists. Your game has ten, maybe fifteen, hit combos? Well, ours has combos that reach the triple-digits. That's right, hundreds of hits before we stop, baby."

Playing it feels like being manic depressive, with amazing highs and suicidal lows, moments when you want to declare it the best game ever made followed by moments of utter frustration and fantasies of ripping the game disc out of the system and smashing it with a rusty axe. It's a game for bullies. You are either bullying or getting bullied, and like that unfortunate but seemingly unavoidable social situation, depending on which end you're on makes all the difference. Of course, when two bullies of equal strength and meanness meet, then you get some real fireworks, and that's when the game really shines.

I've played online matches and annihilated my opponent with beautiful displays of chains, air combos, and epilepsy-inducing Hyper Combos. In these cases, I felt like a fighting game god, like the ghosts of Jet Li, Jackie Chan, Bruce Lee, and Clint Eastwood were haunting my hands as I dished out combos with lightning-like speed and precision. Satisfaction flowed from my crown to the soles of my feet. "I love this game," I whisper to myself.

Then I get into another match. The round starts, and before I can even move, my characters are juggled, pounded, and brutally thrown around the screen as I hammer on my fight stick in vain. As I get hit, the combo counter goes from 5 to 10 to 25 to 45, then it starts over and reaches into the 60s, then starts over and all my characters are dead. These matches are the opposite of fun. These are matches that I might as well put my controller on the ground because it would be as effective a defense as me actually trying to play. These matches make me hate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and question my self-worth as a human being. I punch the couch. I yell things like "fuck" and "pussy cock bitch" at the screen. Thoughts cross my mind about selling the game, and my arcade stick, and all of my other fighting games.

Unlike something like Super Street Fighter IV, when I get utterly destroyed in MVC3, I often don't even understand why. I mean, I understand that I am playing someone who is much better than me, but what I don't understand is why I was beaten on a technical level. When I get badly beaten in SSFIV, I usually can look at the fight or think back about it, and I can see where I made mistakes. I can figure out how my opponent, because of their skill, was able to take advantage of my weaker playing. The point is, I understand what happened and can therefore grow from the experience and hopefully become a better player. Frustration is such an issue with MVC3 for me because I often don't feel like I'm getting better, or even understand how I can begin to improve.

As I said, it's a game of extremes. It's hard for me to recommend it, but it's also hard not to recommend. The only way I can really enjoy this game, not being a highly skilled fighting game savant, is to sit around with some friends, either online or off, and just play each other. This is the kind of game that makes me wish I had some magical roommates I could manifest any time to play some Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 for hours. It seems built to play with a large group of friends often, and over the course of years to allow for rivalries and the development of skills against particular players. In this scenario the game is a blast, and even though I don't necessarily have this situation at my finger tips, I think I'll still be keeping the game around for a long time. Even in moments of the utmost frustration, I still want to keep playing, and I think that says a lot about the depth and feel of the experience. For all my whining about not feeling like I'm getting any better, I do feel like I learn something new every time I turn it on, and that's exciting in the context of a fighting game.

I guess there's always cosplayers to make me smile when I get crazy pissed off at the game (I love the chubby Haggar and skinny Haggar in the top left).

Here's some game footage from the fellas over at Giant Bomb if you want a taste.

Mega Log 3: Fire and Ice

2011-02-19T13:29:00.000-06:00

Like love and hate, there's a thin line between Fire Man and Ice Man.

Wait, shit, no there isn't.

Ice Man
A couple of things stood out to me while playing through Ice Man's stage. The first was that it contains the earliest form of the "head shot" in any games that I've personally played. When one of the enemies is shot in the legs, it separates and continues attacking with its head, but when shot in the face, it's destroyed completely. I'm sure its not the first example of the one-head-shot-kill, but it was fun to conceptually connect zapping a silly green cartoon robot in the dome to sniping a dude's brains out from two hundred yards in a modern military shooter like Call of Duty or Battlefield.

The other thing I noticed and was impressed by, and that a lot of the other stages have as well, is multiple ways to get through sections of a stage. This isn't to say that the stages branch off. They are extremely linear, but there is often multiple ways of getting through an area. For example, there are two sections with disappearing and re-appearing blocks that you must memorize to get to the next area. After I was having trouble with a later section, I looked up a playthrough video on YouTube, and noticed that the maker of the video solved both blocks puzzles in a different way than I had. This, coupled with the use of all of the robot masters' weapon abilities, show a little of the depth of the Mega Man games, and why they are still talked about and loved.

Fire Man
Fire Man's stage has, like most of the levels so far, some pillow-punchingly frustrating moments, but it was definitely easier than Ice Man's disappearing blocks and floating platforms that, by the way, shoot you to your death the moment you think it's safe to jump.

Using Mega Man's gun that creates temporary platforms can help a lot in this and Ice Man's stage, and it got me thinking that giving the player the choice whether or not, and when, to use the robot master abilities was an incredibly ingenious chunk of game design. This is because it does a couple very interesting things at once.

First, it creates an experience in which the player has to figure out which weapons and abilities work the best for which enemies and situations. Not only that, but the player must also experiment with the order they choose to play the levels in. While this may seem a bit frustrating and time-consuming today, (and is the main reason why I'm using the internet to do the brunt of the work for me) when you're a young kid who only gets to buy or rent a few games in a year, it makes the game feel much bigger than it really is. It adds a layer of depth that creates multiple playing possibilities. You could spend weeks trying all the different weapons and abilities on different enemies, areas, and bosses.

The second thing that the combination of weapons and choice of sequence in receiving those weapons does in Mega Man is allow the player to set his or her own difficulty when playing the game. This doesn't mean that you can make Mega Man super easy, but if you know which weapons to use and when, the game becomes manageable to someone like myself who plays a lot of games but isn't exactly Billy Mitchell, and if you are an evil game-playing savant like the dark lord of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, the game is designed in such a way that it's possible, barely, to get through it without using the extra abilities, just your trusty Mega Buster. So, there is a difficulty range, though not exceedingly wide, that the player self-imposes. As I said before, pretty ingenious stuff.

Next time, we delve into Dr. Wily's castle, but the Mega Log may go on hold for a bit. The epileptic explosion of a fighting game Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds has taken hold of me and refuses to let go. If I can tear myself away, I may write something about it. Also, I've somehow gotten into playing Battlefield: Bad Company 2 online and am surprised at just how much I'm enjoying it. Toodles.

Mega Log 2

2011-02-10T08:37:00.000-06:00

Elec Man has shuffled off this mortal coil with the help of my barrage of flying robotic scissors, which were torn from the flaming corpse of Cut Man. Now I have the power of the entire Electoral College in my mega-buster.

Guts Man's platforms were scary, but those asshole, un-killable things that knock you off of platforms in Elec Man's stage were just plain frustrating. I spent about five to ten minutes on the first screen. He's got disappearing blocks too. I remember disappearing blocks when I think of playing Mega Man in grade school. Good times.

Next up, Ice Man.

Mega Man Mega Log 1

2011-02-08T11:06:00.000-06:00

A few days ago, I was suffering from Dead Space 2 fatigue. I was playing through the game, which is fantastic fun, a second time, but I was starting to get burnt out. I'd dismembered my thousandth necromorph and punched the head off of my thousandth undead space grade schooler. I needed a break. I looked through my stack of games and spotted the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the original Xbox. The game was a quick buy for me over a year ago. It was less than ten bucks and I knew that it was backward compatible on my 360, so I picked it up. I'd never really dove into it, and looking at it, I realized that I'd never beaten, or spent a significant amount of time with, any of the Mega Man games. So, I'm going to attempt to play through all of them on the collection in order. The disc includes Mega Man 1 to Mega Man 8 and a couple "never-before-released" Mega Man games. Now, I'm not making any promises here. I could get stuck on Mega Man 1 and give up in an infantile rage. It's been known to happen.

In full disclosure, I'm going to use some online guides to look up the order that I should fight the bosses in. If you're not up on your Mega Man, the games have a basic structure that was pretty unique for the time. You can play any level in any order you want, but each boss robot at the end of the level gives you a special weapon that you can use after defeating them. Most robot bosses have a weakness to one of the other robot's weapons, so there is usually one or two paths through the game that are the most efficient. I understand that part of the fun of the Mega Man games, at least when they first came out, was trying to figure out the best order to play the game in. I'm cheating by getting that information from the internet. Why? Because I'm not nine-years-old and have only one game to play for six months with no job, or girlfriend, or drinking problems. I'm a grown man who wants to play a game about being a blue robot man-child. That's why.

First up, Mega Man 1, which had some amazing cover art. My first session, I played through Bomb Man's stage, Guts Man's stage, and Cut Man's stage. Here were some of my thoughts.

Bomb Man: Piece of cake. I thought these games were supposed to be hard. Fighting Bomb Man was like fighting a tired three-year-old. Now I got bombs, fools.

Guts Man: Holy shit, who would build these fucking platforms that fucking drop you like this. This is fucking impossible. There's no way a human could get past this part. Jesus, is this as far as I'm going to get in the Mega Man Collection, the second stage.

After about fifteen straight minutes of trying to get past the moving platforms, I finally got through, and bombed the shit out of Guts Man. Now I have...guts, I guess.

Cut Man: Kind of a tough stage, but nothing as frustrating as Guts Man's falling platforms on rails. Threw a couple of bricks at Cut Man using Guts Man's throwing ability and he died easy enough. Now I have some scissors, or something.

That's it for Mega Log 1. Tune in next time for the shock of Elec Man and possibly the cold heart of Ice Man.

A Year's Worth Pt. 2: Suprises

2011-01-08T08:40:00.009-06:00

Here are a couple games that I played last year that surprised me. Enjoy.

Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance (Xbox Live Arcade)

Castlevania HD is a strange beast. The game got a lot of negative reviews when it came out, so when I downloaded the demo, I didn't have high hopes. After playing the one level in the demo, I felt the game was slow-paced, difficult, and the loot and gold drops from enemies and treasure chests fell to the player like molasses. I decidedly deleted the demo and forgot about the game. Then, a month or two later, a couple of friends downloaded it and asked me to get it too. They claimed they were having a blast with it. I figured they both couldn't be crazy, so I said damn the critics and downloaded the full game. Playing Castlevania HD by yourself is like playing football alone in your backyard, you can throw and catch the ball, sure, but it's not going to be very satisfying. The game supports up to six players at once, but even playing with one other person makes it exponentially more fun, and with six, the levels go from taking fifteen or twenty minutes to taking five to ten minutes. Put simply, with one player, the game is a boring slog, but with some friends or random strangers, it becomes an addictive speed-run-style, loot fest with the classic Japan meets Bela Lugosi, Castlevania charm.

Darksiders (Xbox 360 and PS3)

Darksiders is a game that, at least initially, turned me off. The art style looked too teen angst, testosterone-filled, "badass, bro," and when I heard that it was basically a Zelda rip-off, I was turned off even more. A "fucking badass" Zelda did not get me excited. Eventually, when I finally and grudgingly played the game, it's overall high quality in almost every aspect turned me into a fan.

The game takes elements from The Legend of Zelda and filters them through Black Sabbath and my fifteen-year-old sense of cool. Often, this kind of tone in a game becomes cringe-inducing to anyone with a normal IQ, but Darksiders is so well made, and is such a pleasure to play, that the tone comes off as charming, immature fun rather than an appeal to meat-heads of all ages. It has the adventurous exploration and feelings of discovery of a good Zelda game, but instead of feeling like a grade-school kid in a park, you feel like a junior-high kid reading comics about demons and bloody swords in your basement. I like when something surprises me, and the level of fun to be had in Darksiders surprised the hell out of me.

A Year's Worth

2011-01-07T13:08:00.010-06:00

Jesus H. Christmas, it's been a long time since I posted anything on this blog. That is all I'm going to say about that. The last thing anyone wants to read is a paragraph about how I haven't written anything for a year. So let's just drop it, okay?

To get back on the blog wagon, I've decided to do a little year end contemplation and compilation. You can find Best Games of the Year lists everywhere, so I think I'll concentrate on the games that I played this year that are still sticking with me, games that I still remember and think about from time to time, games that I'm still playing. And yes, I know, some of these didn't even come out in 2010, but that's when I played them, smart ass. Here's the first batch:

Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (Nintendo DS)

I still haven't beat the game, and I kind of don't want to. It's the kind of game that you can play for years, literally, even after finishing the main story. It's sense of humor and charm mixed with the sleek, user-friendly game design give me hope that maybe the traditional Japanese role-playing game isn't dead. A perfect handheld game.

Bayonetta (Xbox 360 and PS3)

The Japanese ruled the video game design world for so long that it feels strange to say that most of the games coming out of Japan now either feel stale, or like poorly guided attempts to appeal to a Western audience. Bayonetta is a game that feels like an older Japanese title in the sense that it's exciting, strange, and bursting with creativity. It has a crazy, punk sense of humor with loads of in-jokes and homages regarding Sega's past and digs at director Hideki Kamiya's previous employer Capcom. The heroine, an eight-feet tall witch who walks like a super-model and sometimes spanks her opponents to death, is so over-sexualized that she goes beyond becoming an object of desire and becomes more of an alien from another planet. The difference between Bayonetta and characters like Lara Croft is that Bayonetta knows that she's a sexed up video game character. She's in on the joke, and she's loving every minute of it. Besides the great characters and the ridiculous world of the game, the action moves and feels as smooth as any third-person action title I've ever touched. Kamiya knows how to make great action games, and this one feels like he poured everything into it. (Unfortunately, I've heard the PS3 version is much worse in the graphical and frame-rate department than the 360 version, which is really a shame.)

Valkyria Chronicles (PS3)
Valkyria Chronicles is one of those games that stands out because the parts of it that are cliched and derivative are still extremely well designed and the parts that are different and new work beautifully. It's a basic turn-based strategy RPG with different types of units, hit points, abilities, etc. What sets it apart is it's gorgeous hand-drawn look, exciting story set in an anime bizarro 1930s Europe, interesting characters, and loads of loving details. Like a real middle-manager, the game makes you monitor the strengths and weaknesses of each character as well as their relationships with one another. I won't soon forget getting characters killed off because I forgot that one of them was allergic to pollen and the other hates the character I paired him up with.

Super Street Fighter IV (Xbox 360 and PS3)

Take a great fighting game and make it bigger and a little better and you have Super Street Fighter IV. I'm still terrible at fighting games, but I'm also still fascinated with the depth and strategy hidden within these button-mashing beauties. I really can't wait to see how Capcom handles Marvel Vs. Capcom 3.

Mass Effect 2 (Xbox 360 and soon to be PS3)

The world of Mass Effect as created by BioWare is one of the most realized science fiction worlds that I've ever experienced. After playing the first two games, I feel like the characters and places on those discs are as real as anything in sci-fi film or literature. BioWare has made a game in which having a conversation with another character is almost as much fun as shooting them in the face. Plus, you can still bone an alien, which makes Fox News angry, and then they make up awesome things like the phrase "SexBox."

Borderlands (Xbox 360 and PS3)

Borderlands is what happens when you mix two genres and actually figure out how to make it work. Those mad Texans at Gearbox Software kept Borderlands alive with some great DLC this year. I played the hell out of this game in 2009, I played it in 2010, and I'm still playing it in 2011. Games that aren't fun don't get played this much. That's a fact, buster.

Super Meat Boy (Xbox Live Arcade)

Super Meat Boy is a temple built to honor the old video game gods of hand-eye coordination and muscle memory. It's a modern HD platformer constructed from blood, gray plastic cartridges, sweat, pillow punches, and frustrated swear words. The crushing difficulty is expertly balanced by incredibly tight controls, super short levels, and instant respawns. It was the hardest, most satisfying gaming experience of the year. Here is their amazing 1990s style commercial for it.

There are a few more games I played in 2010 that I'd like to talk about, so come back soon.

Afros and Chocobos

2010-03-10T14:16:00.003-06:00

So, I've played about four or five hours of Final Fantasy XIII in the last two days. Overall, I'm having fun and am intrigued by the design decisions that were made, but it's also frustrating in unexpected ways.

First of all, the first few hours have big shiny training wheels attached. You are given the choice between attacking enemies and drinking a potion, and that's it. Period. I felt like the game was a group of older siblings that make you watch them play something really cool. I kept thinking, "Come on guys, let me play! Please," and the game kept saying, "I'll let you play in a little bit, just shut up and hold on a sec." I wouldn't blame anyone for shutting it off with a "Thanks, but no thanks" gesture. Fortunately or unfortunately, I guess, I paid sixty dollars for this son of a bitching game, so I kept at it, and once the game actually let's you, you know, play it, it becomes much more interesting.

Let me just get this out of the way, the graphics are gorgeous. I picked up the PS3 version of the game, and I'm still stopping in the middle of doing something just to look around at the amazing environments. I want to eat everything, the sunlight fading in the horizon, the waves of a lake frozen in time as magical crystals, the sash flung over a character's shoulder, the afros. If Deadly Premonition is like seeing some crazy avante-garde noise-metal-comedy band in someone's basement with cigarette butts stuck to your shoes, then FFXIII is a night at the opera, tuxedos, champagne, and all that.

The combat system is deceptively simple at first, even after the three hour RPG kindergarten at the beginning. You control only the leader of the three person party. The other two characters are controlled by AI that competently do the most effective action at that particular time. Where things get interesting is when the "Paradigm" system is introduced. It consists of choosing groups of classes or jobs for you and your party members. This can be done instantly at any time during combat with just a few button presses. You might start a battle, for example, by having all of your characters use jobs that make them attack with all they've got. Then, when your party has taken some damage, you might change to a Paradigm that has one of your party members use healing skills. This works in conjunction with "Staggering," a system in which enemies who've taken a lot of consecutive damage are weakened momentarily. It's an interesting angle on the classic JRPG battle system. The AI does all of the micro-managing for you while you tell them what to do in a more general way. That sounds like the combat would be extremely passive, but in practice you are kept constantly on your toes, switching Paradigms at the right time in order to heal, buff, de-buff, or deal the most damage at the most effective time. I'll probably have more of an opinion on this later when I get to more challenging enemies, but right now, I'm really enjoying it.

I'll just quickly say that the story is, so far, pretty interesting and not as cliched or generic as I was expecting. The majority of the characters are likable, which in a JRPG is saying a lot. So far, I only want to punch the perky, giggling, idiotically positive girl named Vanille in the face all the time, but hopefully she'll be killed off. Let's keep our fingers crossed.

Well, that's all for now. I might write more about this game as I get deeper in. Laters.

Twin Peaks as Japanese "B" Game

2010-03-08T18:49:00.006-06:00

In an attempt to re-re-re-re-start this goddamned festering scar on the internet that I call a video game blog, I've decided to start doing a gaming diary. Here we go.

Dear Diary,

Today I played a few hours worth of Access Games and Ignition Entertainment's Deadly Premonition. I borrowed the game from a co-worker, and I'm already hatching a plan to either purchase it from him or trade him something for it. The game is interesting, first of all, because it retails brand new for about $19.95 in an age of $59.95 games. It's what we call a "budget title" in the gaming biz, and most of us gamers read this as "pile of dog shit." Deadly Premonition fits this label in the sense that the graphics are straight outta 1999. It's pretty obvious from the start that this is not a game that broke any budget records, but it wears it's budget proudly. In the tradition of great B movies, the game uses it's budget constraints as an excuse to get wildly creative, and it loves to let you know that they know what kind of game they've made. The protagonist, for example, is constantly talking about his favorite movies. So far he's mentioned American Werewolf in London, Tremors, and Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, but more about this stuff later.

Deadly Premonition represents that B movie creativity and energy that I've been craving in this generation of games. Most games already have B movie plots, characters, and settings, but then they throw millions of dollars at them to make them look, sound, and feel like blockbuster Hollywood films. Like Hollywood blockbusters, these expensive AAA game titles often turn out as boring, predictable spectacles, enjoyable for moments and then thrown away to be forgotten. Obviously this isn't always the case. If it was I wouldn't play so many games in the first place, but a game like Deadly Premonition puts these problems into high relief.

Let me just talk about the actual game a bit. If I had to categorize it, I would call it an open-world, survival horror, investigation game. The mechanics I've encountered so far include driving around the small town of Greenvale, finding clues at crime scenes and on a corpse, and fighting off zombie/ghouls with an FBI issued handgun in a Resident Evil kind of way. The beauty of the game, in regards to game play mechanics and everything else, is that it is simultaneously unoriginal and absolutely new. All of these familiar mechanics feel thrown together in a way that, instead of feeling chaotic and unpolished, feel novel and fun.

In this unoriginal yet original mold, the story is Twin Peaks. I don't mean it is inspired by the TV show, I mean it is the TV show. Well, let me take that back a small step. It's Twin Peaks after being filtered through the minds of a team of Japanese game developers with their past gaming experiences, culture, and specific personalities. You play as Agent Francis York Morgan of the FBI who has been sent to a small northwestern American town to investigate the murder of a young blond woman who has been brutally murdered. Agent York also has a split personality named Zach that he constantly talks to, much like Agent Cooper's ever present tape recorder Diane. Agent York also shares Agent Cooper's love of coffee and his eye for quasi-mystical symbols in the world that allow him to solve his cases. The two agents also both visit surreal red rooms full of funny talking weirdos when sleeping at night.

While it is a total ripoff of the TV show, it has enough of it's own silly weirdness to stand on it's own (and avoid any lawsuits). Unlike Agent Cooper, who is lovable and admirable in his peculiarities, Agent York is, from the start, a borderline psychopath who loves cartoons, horror movies, and being a total dick to the local law enforcement. When we first meet him, he's on the phone explaining to someone why Tom wants to be hurt by Jerry and why they suffer from something called "inter-dependency." Yes.

Let's just say, that I'm very interested in playing more of this game.

After getting a taste of Deadly Premonition, it will be an interesting comparison to play Final Fantasy XIII in the next few days when it comes out. FFXIII has been in production for years and has had vats of money dumped into it. By all accounts it is eye-stabbingly gorgeous and tightly designed. We'll see if it can approach the psychotically creative Deadly Premonition as a memorable gaming experience or if it will stumble over it's own budget and fall into the pit of forgettable blockbusters.

MW2 Y'all.

2009-11-13T15:30:00.003-06:00

Steve Agee of Sarah Silverman Program fame on his Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 purchase:

His caption reads "a 40yr old man way too happy about his video game purchase!"

I can empathize. I stood in the cold for about forty-five minutes in the middle of the night with about 100 to 150 mouth-breathing weirdos, purchased my game, played it online until about three in the morning, then went to work at eight. Waking up hard after my four hours of sleep, I thought, "This is ridiculous."

Still, it's not like I'm not going to buy Modern Warfare 2 on launch day. Now, where's my "mouth-breathing weirdo" shirt?

P.S. Ice-T enjoys the video games as well.

Have People Gotten Dumber and Lazier?

2009-08-16T01:37:00.003-05:00

I've been thinking a lot about a post about modern cinema on my brother's Dancing Chicken blog. Coincidentally, I recently purchased a Playstation One system at my local game store for dirt cheap, and also picked up the Final Fantasy Anthology collection, which contains Final Fantasy V and Final Fantasy VI. Now, Final Fantasy VI is considered by many game snobs to be the best Final Fantasy game ever created by famed Japanese game company Square Software. The game came out in 1994 and was released in North America on the Super Nintendo as Final Fantasy III. I'd never played the game before, and it was the major reason I picked up a PS1 again. I won't get too deep into it, but the opening credit sequence of the game impressed me in such a way that I couldn't help thinking about this ongoing debate, between a lot of folks, about whether or not we live in stupider times compared to the past.

The reason I say this is that the two minute credit sequence to a Super Nintendo game from the mid-1990's seemed to me to be more cinematic, dramatic, and effective than the majority of big-budget, mainstream movies and/or games that I've experienced in the last few years. It's simple, quietly beautiful, and just plain well executed, within the realm of its medium, than most pieces of culture today. Maybe this sounds like hyperbole, and maybe it is, but it is one of only a handful of game cinematics to make me say "wow" in a very long time, and it's from the early 1990's.

I'm mainly talking about the last couple of minutes of this video:

This reaction was pulled from me not with state-of-the-pants, cutting-edge graphics and sound, but with 16-bit, fifteen-year-old technology. It depicts, in it's limited way, a slow, plodding march of three war machines toward a snowy village that the player knows can only end badly for the people involved. We've already been shown that the two soldiers only care about getting their hands on the object that they've been ordered to take, and that the woman with them is a powerful individual who has been brainwashed with some kind of device to help the soldiers against her will. This opening scene fills the player with a feeling of melancholy and doom in just a handful of minutes. It's an example of how big-budget, contemporary games and films try to create drama by throwing money at the problem instead of simple, but powerful, craftsmanship. It's as if many of these projects are made under the motto, "Just wow them, just throw more of everything in there until they don't know what the hell is happening."

I felt much the same way when I watched Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker, a film discussed in two of the essays that are referenced in the Dancing Chicken post. The action in that film is intense, but it is also very clear and understandable. We know what is happening, we know the goals of the characters, and we know the consequences of the characters' actions. The movie is extremely effective because it is well thought out and well crafted. The tension comes from what is specifically happening in a given situation and the characters involved, not from loud noises and quick, over-the-top violence. Instead of flashy camera tricks and vomit-inducing editing, she does it the old fashioned way, the same way I feel Yoshinori Katase handled Final Fantasy VI.

Tall Nerd/Short Nerd

2009-07-11T19:33:00.003-05:00

Offworld, Boing Boing's video game site, have a really great TV documentary from Europe posted right now. It's an hour long conversation between Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford. One is young and tall, the other is old and short, and they're both really intelligent guys who have a lot of interesting things to say about games and game design. If you're interested in video games at all, you should take a look.

Magic Internet, bring me to the desired page (this is the link).

Happy Bungie Day!

2009-07-07T16:28:00.002-05:00

I just found out that it's Bungie Day. Bungie, the makers of the fine Halo games, are celebrating their existence by playing Halo 3 with us regular jack-offs all day long. I'm going to pop on in a little while and will hopefully get a chance to play with some of the developers. Keep your fingers crossed!

The Great Fake Game Cavalcade

2009-06-19T12:59:00.002-05:00

Here's a fun link that Kotaku posted. It's the result of a bunch of folks creating screen shots from fake, 8-bit games based on real movies. It's fun.

Weekly Free Time Blackhole

2009-06-16T21:06:00.006-05:00

In an effort to bring this blog back from the dead, I'm attempting a weekly post about what I've personally been up to in the video game department. We'll see just how "weekly" it actually becomes, but here's keeping my fingers crossed because, as we all know, everything always gets done through pure luck, never hard work and perseverance. Basically, I'll be briefly giving an update on what games and game experiences I've been sinking my time into during the previous week or so. Here goes.

This week consisted of a few games that are a little old, something really old, and something brand new but actually about something that is pretty old.

I saw a dramatic increase in online-first-person-shooters. Call of Duty 4 and Halo 3 have been getting a lot of play time recently. Considering these games are both over a year old, the fact that a ton of people all over the world still play them online says a lot about how good they both are. I'm mediocre, at best, at both of these games, but I can usually do well enough that I don't become completely frustrated.

I mostly play Halo 3 with some guys from work, and that makes a big difference in how much fun it is. In fact, I never really got into Halo 3 until I played with someone I actually knew in real life. That's when the game really clicked for me, and I saw the amazing digital playground that Bungie has built, where all kinds of crazy things are possible. I must warn you, though, Halo 3 can temporarily turn you into a dude's dude. M. said that she actually heard me from the other room yell into my headphone mic, "This is my bridge, motherfucker!" I don't remember any such exclamation. I guess my testicles must have taken over for a few minutes.

Call of Duty 4 is completely different than Halo in almost every way except that they're both online FPSs. It's difficult, intense, and can be very frustrating, but the game is almost always fair. If you suddenly die and you're not sure what happened, it was probably completely your own fault. If Halo 3 is like playing with a Nerf football at the park with some friends, then Call of Duty 4 is like playing in the National Championship. Both are a lot of fun for completely different reasons.

The really old something that I started playing this week is the classic sci-fi RPG Phantasy Star II, originally for the Sega Genesis. I picked it up on Xbox Live Arcade for just a few bucks because I'd always heard that the Phantasy Star games were really good, and I've been in the mood for a late-80's/early-90's role-playing game recently. I don't have a lot to say about it yet because I've just started, but how could you not want to play this game. I mean, just look at the awesome cover.

The "something old made new" game is, of course, Ghostbusters the Video Game. I've only had it for a day, so I can't talk a lot about it. I'm on the fence right now. There has been moments where I'm having a lot of fun and feel like part of the Ghostbusters crew, but there have been stretches where I've just been bored by repetitious gameplay and weird game mechanics. I'm really excited to try the online co-op mode when I get a chance. I'll probably write more about this game when I've had some more time with it.

Well, that's it for this week. If you close your eyes as tight as possible and wish for it, maybe I'll be back next week with a more concise synopsis of my gaming life. Long live Gozer.

You Got Mike Patton in My Video Game. You got Video Game in My Mike Patton.

2009-04-27T12:47:00.003-05:00

Continuing to prove that being able to talk and sing in goofy voices and make weird sounds with your mouth can be both artistically rewarding and financially lucrative, Mike Patton, I just found out, was the voice of all of the infected creatures in Valve's awesome co-op FPS Left 4 Dead. He will also provide the voice of the main character, Nathan "Rad" Spencer, in Capcom's upcoming Bionic Commando reboot/remake/sequel. Crazy!

Take a short dip into this long video to check out some of his great zombie noises:

Here's the trailer for Bionic Commando:

Life Inside a 1980's Japanese Testosterone Gland

2009-04-22T12:49:00.003-05:00

I've been playing a lot of Outrun Online on XBLA as a sort of "betweener" game (game played between more time-consuming games). Like all of the other Outrun games, it can be summed up with the following equation:

essence of Magnum P.I. + essence of Cannonball Run + Japanese arcade-style racing game + fever-induced hallucinatory dream state = Outrun.

An Awesome Podcast for Folks

2009-03-26T02:38:00.002-05:00

If you have even a cursory interest in video games, video game culture, or video game preservation, you should check out Robert Ashley's podcast A Life Well Wasted. It's being called, by various sources, the This American Life of video game radio shows (sorry, I'm not going to site anything because I don't remember where I read this, but it's accurate). Basically, what this means is that it's not totally boring for people that don't play video games for 3 to 8 hours a day. It's interesting whether you play tons of games or haven't played anything since 5th grade. Check it out.

One More Voice Added to the Choir: Street Fighter IV Impressions

2009-02-19T10:54:00.002-06:00

I've only played Street Fighter IV for a handful of hours, but I can already tell that the game deserves the praises it's being sung. It's gorgeous, it's smooth, and it's just plain fun. The new and old mesh of combo systems, EX attacks, and focus attacks create situations in which a small number of relatively simple mechanics build and combine to create complex gameplay with lots of tactical options during matches. What this means is that matches are much more dramatic and can turn on a dime. In SFIV, a player with only 10% of their health left, but who has a full Ultra or Super meter, is still very much "in the game." While this could feel unfair or cheap, the game seems balanced enough that you never feel like you couldn't have done something to counter the large damage stuff.

The online play, so far, is a lot of fun. I've only fought a handful of matches, but they have all been enjoyable and with only a tiny bit of lag involved. There are silly titles and icons to unlock by playing online matches, and while they don't really do anything, they work well as an incentive to play more. It feels good to unlock a new icon or dumb title and adds to the "one more match" feel. Overall, the game has a lot of fun little stuff you can unlock, like different colors and taunts.

That's all for now about it. I just wanted to give my little thumbs to the sky about the little bit I've played so far. I can't wait to play more.

P.S.
I have a feeling that all of the people complaining about the boy-band-style opening cinema music will be humming it in their sleep soon enough. I think it's brilliant cheese.

Three-Dimensional Dragon Puncher

2009-02-12T14:10:00.004-06:00

I got myself a new toy. Having this Street Fighter Ken controller is kind of like when you're a kid and you get new shoes that you just know will let you run faster. Plus, the image in the center is a goddamned hologram! I think everything should have holograms: shoes, cookware, pants, coffee mugs, soda, light bulbs....

It gets me pumped for the new Xbox 360 Street Fighter IV fightpad.

Next week SFIV drops.

Be there or be Dan.

In the meantime, I'm waiting for our corner game shop to finally get copies of Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection so I can retro-game my brains out.

Resident Evil 5 Demo Cry Babies

2009-02-02T20:35:00.002-06:00

Dear Internet,

It has come to my attention that a large number of internet commenters have found the Resident Evil 5 demo unsatisfactory. The argument usually consists of one or the other, sometimes a combination of, following points:

1) The controls are shit.

2) It's not scary.

Let me attempt a rebuttal to the preceding points. First of all, as many fine folks have tried to explain to these complainers, the controls are not "shit," the controls are Resident Evil controls. Not many games can get away with the whole "we made the controls awkward to make the game more exciting" argument, but Resident Evil games can. Now that I think about it, they are the only games that I know of that can get away with this. Badly designed controls imply that no thought went in to them and that they feel awkward and unwieldy for the entirety of the game. If RE controls are "bad," then why is it that I feel like a badass when I play Resident Evil 4? Why is it that I can, after a ten or twenty minute adjustment period, take out an entire Spanish village of parasite-infested lunatics? It's because the controls are not awkward. They may feel that way at first, but really, they are just very specifically designed to the game that they exist in. As many others have noted, if you could run and shoot and circle-strafe in a Resident Evil game, it would cease to be a fun and exciting experience and the entire game would have to be modified to make it so.

I think that this reaction has something to do with how realistic the game looks. It's like people, who haven't played a lot of Resident Evil 4, see the graphics and immediately, maybe subconsciously, expect the game to be a combat simulation, something like Rainbow Six or Call of Duty with supernatural horror elements. Those of us who have played a lot of RE4 or any of the Resident Evil games know how "gamey" they are. What I mean is that they are clearly not supposed to replicate a real-world experience. You mix brightly colored herbs together and spray them on your body to heal, for God's sake, and when was the last time you locked a door by taking an emblem off of it, breaking it into pieces, and then hiding those pieces in various parts of your house?

The response to the comment "It's not scary" is that it is a fifteen to twenty minute demo. Maybe the final game won't be scary at all, I don't know, but making a judgement like that after playing about one percent of the game is pretty ridiculous. That one percent of game might be sunny and bright, but that doesn't mean the entire game will be. Besides, was anyone actually scared by Resident Evil 4? I'll admit that there are some really great, tense moments in the game, but I wouldn't call it scary in a traditional horror movie sense. Most of the previews I've read for RE5 mention that the game has a lot of this anxiety, these "oh shit, I have to reload my shotgun but I've got three dudes ready to bite my face off" kind of moments.

I guess what really gets my goat is this tendency to have an incredibly negative, knee-jerk reaction to things and then letting everyone in the world know about it. I realize you have to take the good with the bad with things like the Internet, but shit people, I've seen hundreds, yes hundreds, of comments that basically say, "I've played a fifteen minute demo of your game, and I think that your entire game is completely terrible and that no one should buy it." Why do you think that big-budget game developers, film studios, radio stations, etc. are terrified to try anything different or challenging? It's because of assholes like you, that's why.

End of rant.

-Love, Plop Blop.

A Quick Post-SFIII Tourney Note

2009-02-01T23:58:00.003-06:00

How did I do? Well, I got Second place in the Losers' Bracket.

Isn't that a Minutemen song?

Just kidding.

I'll probably write more on this later, but I had a really great time in the informal Street Fighter III Third Strike tournament that went down this afternoon. Thanks to all those involved. I honestly feel sorry for you suckers that watched the Super Bowl instead of exchanging blows in digital Japanime format. It was one of the best Super Bowl Sundays I've had.

A few observations:

1) People who can play heavy-metal style guitar solos in the dark while high are usually good at Street Fighter.

2) Street Fighter games, when played with two or more individuals in a room, can cause both total silence and/or the screaming of phrases only a homeless madman would normally create ("You better throw him, girl BITCH!").

3) The characters "Hugo" and "Akuma," but especially Hugo (pictured above), are goddamned walking nightmares, and will probably be visiting my dreams for many evenings to come.

The Amazing Exploding PS2 Controller, and Greg Gates

2009-01-30T10:39:00.006-06:00

As the title to this post indicates, some sort of static electricity phenomenon completely fried my PS2 controller. I was playing Persona 3, winning a high school track meet and going to a French film festival with a friend (that's what you do in that game!), and when I was finished, I got up to shut of my system when I felt a small shock in my hand. When I looked at the screen, my game character was running around in a circle and menus were popping up and going away at seizure-inducing speed. The controller had gone bananas.

The next day, I felt the need to continue my SFIII training, but alas, no controller. What was I to do? Sometimes life hands us these tough questions, and it takes G. Gordon Liddy-like will to not end up on the floor, crying into a pile of tissues. I got my stuff together, wiped the tear from my cheek, and fired up the Super Nintendo. I had several games, which I had purchased for practically two pebbles and a leaf, that I had yet to try out on the SNES. Out of the pile, I chose a shooter by the name U.N. Squadron.

U.N. Squadron is like an alternate-history game in which G. Gordon Liddy became head of the United Nations Air Force...oh, and also, that the United Nations had an armed Air Force. (Wait, does the U.N. have an Air Force? I mean, I know they have planes that bring oatmeal to villages and shit like that, but do they have like Airwolf helicopters and stealth bombers? Man, I really don't know shit about the U.N.) Besides just being a great side-scrolling shooter, the game introduced me to one of my new favorite video game characters, Greg Gates.

First off, what a great name for a game character, Greg Gates. It's like someone's dad's name. So, who is Greg Gates? Being a SNES shooter, there really isn't much characterization going on, but by the looks of it, Greg Gates is what a fifty-five-year-old, alcoholic air force pilot version of Super Mario would look like. Basically, he looks old, hungover, pissed off, and like he takes absolutely no guff, exactly who I want to save the world from secret air-force-focused terrorist groups. The image above is from the arcade version of the game. The SNES version of Greg is just like the above, but with a handful of stank thrown on, like the same photo taken after a three-day bender (sorry, I couldn't find a good SNES screenshot). Thank you Greg Gates, for turning my loss of a controller into a win.

Let me just finish by saying that the game was made ten times more enjoyable when I began to yell, "Watch out, Greg Gates!" and, simply, "GREG GATES!" while shaking my fist in the air every time I was shot down.

P.S. Sorry about all the G. Gordon Liddy stuff. An old roommate of mine bought me a paperback version of Liddy's book Will as a joke, and it's been sitting on my table for a long time. I noticed it the other day and it's been stuck in my head ever since. Did you know he acted in MacGyver, Airwolf, and Miami Vice? What a nutjob.

Greg Gates.

Keys to the Dojo: Street Fighter III Third Strike Training Day Three

2009-01-19T14:48:00.008-06:00

A few of the fellas down at the power plant where I work informed me of their plans to throw an informal Street Fighter III Third Strike tournament in a week or two.

"Do you want to play?" they asked.

"Yes," I responded, "Yes I do."

I immediately realized that I'm like a baby orangutan watching television with most fighting games, fascinated but utterly perplexed by the colors and sounds being thrown about. I decided it was time to take a pro-active stance against my video fisticuffs deficiency, time to do some serious training, time to tape up the thumbs and step into the dojo.

I've never been really good at fighting games, but strangely, I've always really liked playing them. There is something about pitting colorful comic-book-style characters against one another that has always captured my imagination. This started, as it did with thousands and thousands of others, with Street Fighter II and it's many iterations. In the early nineties, hours were spent huddled around the SNES at my best friend's house, battling away with him and his many brothers, passing the controller and screaming at the TV, strange words like "hadouken" and "shoryuken" being branded deep into our minds. It was like playing an amazing anime based on our favorite movies at the time. Those being Bloodsport, American Ninja, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Kickboxer, and also, more Bloodsport.

The designers at Capcom seemed to have snuck into our rooms at night and sucked our violent young-male fantasies out from the backs of our heads as we slept--Van Dammes, Bolo Yeungs, Bruce Lees, and all--building a game we didn't even know we wanted so badly. Many great fighting games followed SFII, all of them aping that game's smooth as silk gameplay and characters who were defined more by the way they moved and fought than by the backstories written in the instruction manual.

This is day number three of my training, and yes it's true, I have an ugly looking blister on my left thumb from from non-stop "hadoukens" and "shoryukens." It took me over three hours to beat the Arcade Mode of the game using Ryu's fair-haired doppleganger, Ken, on what I thought was difficulty level four. To my chagrin, I found out after slaving away, that the game was actually set on difficulty three. "Blast it! Will I never get bettter!?" I thought to myself, but last night I set the difficulty to six and had at it. Within an hour and a half, I had reached the final boss, a multi-colored douchebag by the name of Gill. It seems my training has paid off. He took me another hour to defeat, literally, as I was walking out the door to have dinner with my Mom. Very dramatic.

All joking aside, Street Fighter III Third Strike is a beautifully put together fighting game, and my "training" is just a great excuse to play it ad nauseum.

Here's a video of one of the best SFIII players in the world doing something goddamned amazing:

1up.com is Gutted, Plop Blop Saddened

2009-01-07T08:59:00.005-06:00

1up.com, one of my favorite gaming websites, has been bought out by a company called UGO, resulting in massive lay-offs of most of the best writers, reviewers, editors, and crew, as well as putting a halt to their podcasts, videocasts, and Electronic Gaming Monthly magazine. I'm surprised at how depressed I got when I heard about it last night. I guess I didn't realize how much I visited the sight. It's like suddenly finding out that your favorite radio station has become an adult contemporary light jazz station ran by John Tesh and a big fat 19th century robber baron.

1up.com always felt, for me, like a sort of "base" in which every other gaming hub was judged. The 1up site was thoughtful and smart, but not too academic, and was staffed by intelligent individuals with a great sense of humor and an obvious love of video games. It's rare to find a media outlet that you trust, but the reviews on 1up, although I didn't always agree with the reviewers, always seemed sincere and carefully considered, and the 1up Show used to be a highlight of my week.

The Fat Cats win again.

Holiday Warm and Fuzzies from Valve

2008-12-22T13:51:00.004-06:00

If you've ever played Portal, and you should, this will give you a holiday chuckle.

Sci-Fi Metal Nerd Bomb

2008-12-12T16:23:00.002-06:00

Here's a fun little Mastodon/Dune mash-up someone put together:

Although Dune is probably David Lynch's worst movie, I saw it for the first time on TV, probably TBS, when I was seven or eight years old. Basically, it fucking blew my little mind into a thousand pieces. For a kid who had never really seen anything besides blockbusters and whatever usual crap they showed on basic cable, Dune was the weirdest, most exciting film I'd ever witnessed. It had cool science fiction stuff that I liked, like spaceships and monsters, but it also had all the wacked-out Lynch stuff that made it exhiliratingly new to me, like creepy eroticism, over the top melodrama, and nightmarish dream segments. I remember drawing pictures of dudes in "stillsuits" trudging through the desert for weeks. The movie stayed with me so strongly, that I read the book when I was in Junior High, probably the longest book I'd ever read at that point.

Also, Sting in his metal bikini still creeps me out.

Japanese Pop Between Zombie Genocides

2008-12-08T12:27:00.004-06:00

Here's a taste of the Japanese pop-culture explosion I've been playing on my old PS2 lately:

Between late-night sessions of Left 4 Dead (damn, that game's got legs) experienced in various states of exhaustion and/or inebriation, I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 FES. I keep hearing folks gushing about the upcoming Persona 4, which I plan to purchase next week, so I dug through my games and yanked out Persona 3 FES. I'd played about 15 or 20 hours of the original Persona 3, got side-tracked, sold it off, and later purchased the FES edition of the game when it was released. This edition of the game is sort of an extended director's cut. It has some new features and a long epilogue to play through after the main game is finished.

The problem is that I'd forgotten how incredibly addictive Persona 3 is, and now I'm afraid that I'll be buying Persona 4 and not unwrapping it until about mid-March when I finish P3FES. I guess, as a gamer, these are the kind of problems that you want to have.

Let me try and explain why P3 is so great. Japanese RPGs have been pretty stale of late. This is ground that is well-tred. People have been talking for years about how they're sick of all JRPGs being about 14-year-old, androgynous, mopey, amnesiac heroes who have to save the world from a bad-ass looking villian through turn-based combat in a fantasy setting. This really hit me recently when I tried to get into Tales of Vesperia on the Xbox 360. Now, Tales of Vesperia is by no means a bad game. In fact, it's a very well-made game. It's got gorgeous, colorful graphics, a likable protagonist, and even an interesting combat system that isn't turn-based, but I just wasn't sucked into the story and world of the game. I really didn't give a shit what happened to the characters or the universe. It felt tired, and I became bored quickly.

Immediately after giving up on Tales of Vesperia, I popped in Persona 3, and it was like a cold splash in the face, in a good way, even though I'd played it before. Instead of a magical, fantasy setting, the game takes place in a modern Japanese city with some supernatural, demonic type shit going down underneath the everyday lives of it's citizens. The protagonist is a bit androgynous and is still a teen, but the other elements of the game are so different that you don't mind this too much. Actually, it's not even that the elements of the game are that different from other RPGs. It's the mixture of those elements that is really unique, the combination of game elements that don't seem to go together, as well as a look and tone that really stands out and feels new.

The game is, at it's base, a dungeon-crawler plus a Pokemon-style monster (called personas in the game) collecting game mixed with a high-school social simulation. That's right, much of the game is about just trying to get through the drudgery and social dangers of high school. The game ingeniously weaves these completely different elements into one another so that actions in each one of them affects the others. Become friends with the fat food critic kid at school, for example, and you will be able to create more powerful personas of a certain type, which will allow you to fight tougher monsters in the dungeon areas. Take these complex and interesting game design choices and slather the whole thing in contemporary J-Pop visual design and music, and you have yourself a really special gaming experience that's hard to put down.

Random Tidbit:
The way in which the characters evoke their personas to fight for them is by pointing a gun at their heads and pulling the trigger. There's something really awesome about watching Japanese high-schoolers repeatedly shoot themselves in the head while pop music plays in the background. That's the kind of crazy shit that sets Persona games apart.

I can't wait for number 4.

Saving a Cultural Icon

2008-11-21T15:54:00.003-06:00

"You have protected WhoompthereItIs"

The combination of a really great multiplayer game (Left 4 Dead) and someone with a great gamertag (WhoompthereItIs) allowed that message to pop up on screen while on Xbox Live last night. Beautiful.

Left 4 Dead, I Will Die 4 U

2008-11-11T22:15:00.006-06:00

I've been playing the Xbox 360 online demo of Valve's new four-player cooperative zombiepocalypse shooter, called Left 4 Dead, for the past couple of days, and I'm really impressed by it.

You know when you're a little kid and your birthday or Christmas is the next day, and you've built it up to be so extravagantly wonderful in your mind that there is no possibility of not being disappointed? My imagination caused a lot of heartbreak when I was a kid. When someone told me they had a gift for me, it would become, in my head, a nirvana-endowing object of ultimate joy and infinite happiness. Expecting a hoverboard or jet-powered mountain bike, I would receive a box of stickers or a tee shirt. Then, I would want to die.

This pattern of expectation and let down has haunted me to this day, and it applies to upcoming video games and their respective hype as well. When, for example, the Silicon Knights' game Too Human was hyped and hyped as being a sci-fi Diablo for console gamers, I was incredibly excited for months. Then I played it, and I hated it. Well, maybe hate is too strong, but it certainly was not what I was led to believe it would be, and more importantly, what I led myself to believe it would be.

Now we have Valve's game, a game I have been dangerously excited about since I heard it even existed. It's a four-player cooperative first-person-shooter set in four zombie infested locales and starring four archetypal characters consisting of a grizzled Vietnam vet (as opposed to the just plain, gosh darn lovable kind), a greasy, tattooed biker, a black retail employee (at least he's not a pro athlete or gangsta), and a wealthy college girl.

There are two main reasons I'm excited about it. First, it's made by Valve, a company known for obsessive attention to quality and polish. Second, it's designed around the idea of co-op play. A lot of games throw in a co-op mode as an afterthought, a bullet point to put on the back of the box, but all of the game mechanics in Left 4 Dead are designed to force players to work together or fail miserably (meaning having your face eaten off).

So far, there is no heartbreak or depression about this game's performance for me. It lives up to it's hype and up to the hype in my head. This is no small feat.

The game lives and breathes co-op, even if you're playing it by yourself and three AI bots. There's a long list of small game scenarios that cannot be resolved by yourself. An example of this is a mutated zombie, one of five "boss" zombies who periodically appear, with a tongue that shoots out and wraps around a player. Once the player is ensnared by this tongue, they are unable to do anything at all and can only be rescued by another player.

Your inventory and the items in it also have been built around the idea of teamwork, communication, and sharing because of scarcity. Players may only carry one health pack to heal, one main weapon and a default pistol, one explosive, and one bottle of pain pills, and that is it, case closed. There is no saving up fourteen health packs or ten pipe bombs for when tough enemies appear. This lack of items forces players to work together. If I already used my health pack and I'm about to die, a teammate can use their health pack to heal me, or if a zombie horde comes gushing out of a doorway, I'd better hope one of us has a pipe bomb or Molotov cocktail because I used mine three minutes ago on accident.

Besides the lack of items, the items themselves take time to use. Reloading all of the weapons is slow, so it pays to have someone watch your back while in the midst of it, and using health packs or reviving a fallen ally is a lengthy process that leaves players vulnerable. This all adds up to game play that requires extensive cooperation.

Probably the most talked about element of Left 4 Dead is it's AI "Director." This is an AI program that the game uses to change the game play experience from moment to moment based on a number of factors including how successful the players are and when the last large enemy onslaught occurred. The idea is to create a game that can be played over and over again, theoretically forever, and never be the same. Although the environments will not change, players never know when, where, or what enemies will spawn over the course of a level. Items, I've noticed, change placement as well.

While this AI Director sounds a bit like a hokey gimmick, the fact that I played the demo, which consists of only two short levels, for over four hours in the last couple of days is obvious evidence that it's successful. I've probably played those two levels over and over again around forty or fifty times, and I'm still not bored. The Director is certainly doing it's job adequately. Boss zombies and rushing zombie hordes spawn at completely unexpected times and places, items are constantly changing locations, and the ever-reliably unreliable human element of random Xbox Live partners adds another level of unpredictability like an exploding cherry on top of it all.

For me, November 18th is going to be better than Xmas.

CliffyB for Brainiacs

2008-10-27T19:29:00.004-05:00

Here's a link to a New Yorker article about Epic Games lead designer Cliff Bleszinski. He's famous for being the man behind the Xbox 360 hit Gears of War and the upcoming sequel, Gears of War 2. Honestly, the guy always seems obnoxious to me, but in a kind of lovable way, like a friend you have who is a jerk but you know that, deep down, he's actually only kind of a little jerk. Anyway, the point is that he makes really fun games, and the snoot brigade at the New Yorker decided to do a little article about him.

I recently gave Gears of War another chance after playing it for a tiny bit a few months ago. The first time I tried it, I recognized how well put together the game mechanics were, but I was sick of testosterone-fueled, blood and guts, space marine, gun fetish games, and I just couldn't get into it. The characters looked like ex-members of Limp Bizkit, and the world felt gray and dreary. Well, a few months later, I was in the mood for some good old fashioned shoot-something-in-the-face-until-it's-head-explodes-and/or-chainsaw-it-in-half gameplay, and I brought the game home. This time, it really hit the spot.

My second attempt at playing it was highly, highly enjoyable. For whatever reason, the game just clicked for me. The cover mechanic worked beautifully, the environments were honey-glazed perfection, and overall, the game just felt great to play. If you're in the right frame of mind, nothing compares to killing a hulking alien humanoid with a chainsaw bayonet (if the U.S. Army implemented these things, I would probably be on a plane to Iraq with a picture of my sweetheart in my shirtpocket by now). Just as I don't want to listen to Slayer everyday of my life, I don't want to play Gears of War everyday, but when you're in the mood for Slayer, you want and need Slayer. Same goes for Gears of War. It really is the best of it's kind, and the reason we are up to our armpits in crappy, boring tough-guy shooters starring grizzled space marines is because the folks at Epic made a fucking awesome gaming experience about being a grizzled space marine killing aliens. Needless to say, I'm looking forward to the sequel.

Here's the Gears of War commercial that they mention in the New Yorker article:

And, the new commercial for Gears of War 2, which features an equally surprisingly non-testosterone-saturated song:

P.S. Fable II is grrrreat.

Waiting to Get Dick Rot in Digital Form

2008-10-20T21:25:00.003-05:00

Fable II comes out tomorrow, and I have a copy of the game patiently waiting for me at my local video game shop. My own patience, on the other hand, is nearly exhausted. I want to play it, goddamn it.

One of the game's many talked about features is not only the ability to have sex with and get married to either gender as either gender, but also to choose whether your digital downstairs escapades will include sexual protection or not (sheepskin condoms, I guess?). Sex without protection can result in pregnancy or an STD, and if you are playing the game as a female character you can become pregnant.

Apparently, the game tracks each NPC's sexual history and assigns a percentage chance that the person will have an STD. So, having sex with a room full of city prostitutes without protection will probably earn you a trip to the ding-dong/hoo-haw clinic, but having a monogamous relationship with your wife or husband will keep your urine a crystal, Mountain-Dew hue but may cause a bun to spring from the loins. I'm unsure how these things will actually effect gameplay or what the consequences of having an STD will be. I just hope that Peter Molyneux and his crew at Lionhead Studios can actually make all of this crazy shit work in a game that is fun and rewarding to play.

What an absolutely ridiculous time to be alive in. I'm actually excited about an electronic character, under my control, getting a sexually transmitted disease in an imaginary, digital world. What a country!

The Fighting Robot aka Knuckle Kid aka Rockman aka Rainbow Man aka Mighty Kid!

2008-10-05T12:55:00.008-05:00

I picked up, for cheap, the Mega Man Anniversary Collection for the original Xbox the other day. It contains the first eight Mega Man games with a couple of super secret bonus games thrown in as well. The Mega Man games are incredibly difficult side-scrollers that are somehow still fun to play. It took me a few minutes to even get past the first screen of Elecman's stage in Mega Man 1. There are few games in this world that will have you yelling "I hit the jump button you goddamned motherfucking fuckface" at the screen while sporting an ear-to-ear smile. That Mega Man games can evoke both of these emotions simultaneously is downright miraculous, and probably helps to explain the longevity of the series.

I'm very sick right now, and probably have a fever. Take my advice, if you're ever in this situation, don't start thinking about the Mega Man universe too hard, it's kind of nightmarish. Why do people keep building themed robots who are designed to beat the shit out of each other? Why would an old man scientist build his badass robot to look like a fourteen-year-old boy? What kind of sick fuck makes a robot named Hard Man?

As an example of this terrifying surreality, check out the cover art for the original Mega Man for the NES. It's generally regarded, rightfully so, as one of the worst pieces of video game box art created by man. It looks like something a future serial killer would draw in his fourth grade class. I mean, who in hell at Capcom or Nintendo of America gave this thing the green-light?

The old Mega Man games are also beloved for their great music. In Japan he's called Rockman, as in Rock and Roll. Here's a band called The Advantage doing Flashman's theme from Mega Man 2 (I added a video of Flashman's level for reference), and The Minibosses doing a Mega Man 2 medley. Enjoy at your leisure.

Yakuza, First Impressions: John Woo Hot Pocket Anime Hooky Flashbacks

2008-09-22T00:49:00.008-05:00

Oh Japan, you tiny string of Asian islands, you. You helped me escape my day-to-day high school drudgery on more than one occasion. Not many worlds are farther away from one another than Japanese anime (movies and video games) and Western Nebraska, and I think that's part of the reason I latched onto the one so fiercely in my teens. One of my favorite things to do in high school was to come home for lunch, decide that I'm not going back to that fucking joint, and stay in my living room watching anime and Hong Kong action films all afternoon (oh yeah, I owe Hong Kong a few nods as well). On one particular occasion, a buddy of mine and I hung out almost all day, ate ham and cheese Hot Pockets, and watched both Ghost in the Shell and Akira back to back. This was probably one of the best days of my high school career. I wanted every girl in my school to find out that I was either a psychically endowed bringer of the apocalypse or a super-secret, dual .45 pistol wielding, white-trench-coat-wearing merchant of death.

So, why all the reminiscing? Well, because of a recent 1up Show regarding the new PS2 game (that's right, they still make new PS2 games) Yakuza 2, I purchased the first game in the series, simply titled Yakuza. I've only played it for a few hours, but the game brought back the feeling I got from watching those Asian action movies while hiding away from the high school hallways of awkwardness all those years ago.

The game tells the story of Kazuma Kiryu, a former yakuza member who protected his best friend by taking the blame for murdering an important yakuza boss. The game kicks in when Kazuma is released from prison ten years after the killing and finds that one friend has become a douchebag and the other is missing. On top of this, every yakuza in town hates his guts and there is 10 billion yen missing from the orginization's vaults. So far, the story is a nice blend of yakuza movie conventions, mystery, action, and melodrama. It was written by Hase Seishu, a popular Japanese crime novelist who has had several of his books turned into movies. (Interestingly, Takashi Miike has directed a few of these, and he also directed a movie adaptation of the Yakuza game, too.)

Kazuma is an A-1, doctor of kicking the turd out of people, and as a protagonist, he's a likable character. He fits comfortably into the noble gangster/outlaw cowboy/ronin/intergalactic smuggler mold, and although his character doesn't really break any new ground, it works well. There's a reason that these types of characters are archetypes. We, as an audience, love to watch a good-hearted badass kick the shit out of some evil badasses, and we, as game players, like to be the good-hearted badass doing the shit-kicking. Still, it would be nice to see some more interesting game protagonists. I'm not very far into the game, though, so who knows how Kazuma may develop? The other characters in the game are a nice variety of underworld thugs, yakuza bosses, and innocent victims who've been pulled into the chaos of the yakuza power struggle.

The gameplay is deceptive at first glance because it looks like an open-world style Grand Theft Auto clone, but if you dig under the shiny GTA wrapper, you'll find a game built like a traditional Japanese RPG. This is another reason the game gives me the warm fuzzies. Some kids get Ritalin and Prozac, I got JRPGs. Although the combat works like a typical brawler (punch, punch, punch, kick, grab, throw, punch, then repeat), the rest of the game works like classic JRPGs. You walk around the red-light district of Tokyo, talk to NPCs, go into shops and buy items, gain experience, and run into random battles. "Random battles?" you ask, "How do you explain random battles in modern Tokyo?" You see, many RPGs have random battles which you encounter while exploring the world. This allows you to gain experience and items, and can be easily explained in a fantasy setting. "Monsters live in the woods" is really all the explanation you need. In Yakuza, they translate this to the real world as "assholes and drunks exist." Basically, as you walk around, some dude will come up to you and say something like "Give me 10,000 yen motherfucker," and then you beat him about the head and mid-section until they apologize or run away.

With all this toughguy machismo, it's nice that the game does have a sense of humor about itself. Most of the time the random encounters will be something expected and will be displayed on the load screen before a battle like "Vs Yakuza" or "Vs Street Thugs," but every once in a while you get something like a drunk old business man starting shit with you, and the load screen will say "Vs Ordinary Citizen." Something about a yakuza martial-arts master having to beat up an old drunk "ordinary citizen" because he won't leave you alone really makes me smile.

Like most JRPGs the game structure is linear. You are told what location to be at to move the main story forward, but there seems to be a lot to do and discover around the city if you want to postpone the main game. For example, I ran into a woman being followed by a creepy old man. After helping her get rid of the guy, she invited me to a bar for some drinks. She flirted with me and kept feeding me booze. I was getting pretty comfortable with this digital relationship when Kazuma passed out and woke up in an alley with all his/my money gone. I tracked her down and she told me that she was forced to lure me into the bar. I went to the bar and fought a mob of employees and the bartender until they gave me my money back and apologized ("Vs Bar Staff," another one that made me chuckle).

While the game has a lot of flaws--the combat is really great, but only when you can get it to work right, and I ran across a stealth section that was just plain infuriating--it time-machines me right back to the mid-90's, sitting on my couch, Hot Pocket in hand, as Chow Yun-Fat blasted some fools with a tear in his eye.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go get a full-body irezumi tattoo. I'm thinking maybe a butterfly, a peace sign, and Calvin peeing on a Toyota emblem.

What's the Haps?

2008-09-05T13:17:00.003-05:00

I haven't felt the urge to really blog about anything in the past month or so, but I figured I'd better update this son of a bee before the natives get restless. So, here's a quick run through of what I've been up to, video game-related or otherwise.

Playing:

Dead Rising (Xbox 360)
A Japanese, George Romero rip-off that swings back and forth between being one of the best games ever made, and one of the worst. Parts of the game are incredibly frustrating, confusing, and just plain broken, but a free-roaming, zombie apocalypse game set in a shopping mall in which you can shove a power auger through a zombie and use its impaled corpse as a spinning weapon of carnage just can't be a bad game.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames (Xbox 360)
Proof of my personal theory that extremely dumb/extremely fun action movies of the 80's have been slowly replaced by extremely dumb/extremely fun action games of the 00's. This game takes the mantra "explosions are cool" and cuts out anything that doesn't correspond to it.

Disgaea: Hour of Darkness (PS2)
Very complex, very funny, very Japanese strategy role-playing game. It's fun in an almost sadomasochistic way. Let's just say that math is involved.

SNK Arcade Classics Volume 1 (PS2)
A collection of 16 SNK/Neo-Geo arcade games from the early to mid-nineties. The majority of them are a lot of fun. SNK created some games with really amazing, detailed graphics that still wow me. Some of these games--Metal Slug, I'm looking at you--are down right gorgeous.

I feel a bit old playing a collection of "classic" games that came out post-my-pubescence. This type of thing always gets me thinking about getting really old, like eighty or ninety, and being in a nursing home. Instead of showing black and white films to keep us busy, are they going to wheel out an old, dusty PS2 and let us geezers play Tekken 3 or Twisted Metal until nap time? There's something slightly horrifying about that thought.

Street Fighter Anniversary Collection (PS2)
Not a lot to say about this one. It's Street Fighter. It's awesome. It has Street Fighter III: Third Strike and Hyper Street Fighter II: Anniversary Edition on one disc. I wish it had Super Street Fighter II: Urinary Tract Infection Anniversay Santeria Edition, but that one's hard to find.

Watching:

Record of Lodoss War
Okay, this one's really nerdy. I mean, it's a Dungeons & Dragons-inspired anime series for shit's sake. Technically, I don't think I'm allowed to even talk to anything female for like a month after having admitted that. It's not great, but it does have that wonderful balance of seriousness, badassery, and extreme cheese that can make mediocre anime fun to watch.

Reading:
Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
I don't have much to say about it. I'm only about a third of the way into it, and I'm really enjoying it so far.
Fun Fact: Nostromo is the name of the human spaceship in the first Alien movie.

Koreans Love Starcraft So Goddamned Much

2008-08-24T10:40:00.005-05:00

Starcraft is so huge in South Korea that doing impressions of it is enough to bring the house down:

And again:

Skate Quickie and Some Live Action Video Love

2008-08-09T12:19:00.007-05:00

Two things that I liked about EA’s Skate after playing it for only about thirty minutes:

1. Finally, some developers took a different approach to skateboard controls than the 400 Tony Hawk games out there. Don’t get me wrong, I loved the Tony Hawk skateboarding games. They were the closest thing to a skate park that the panhandle of Nebraska in 1999 had. My friends and I spent hours trying to top each other’s scores. The game was wonderfully easy to pick up and play. After just a few minutes of goofing around with it, you could do all sorts of peculiarly named, outrageous looking skateboard acrobatics. The problem is that ever since Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was released, every skateboarding game worth a damn has functioned in the same basic, crazy-arcade-style way.

Skate approaches its subject from the exact opposite side. Instead of a game in which you can pick up the controller and do a 720-Air-Bud-to-Fakie-Ass-Grind-to-Real-Estate-Stomp (I just made this move up, but I bet $1 that it exists or will exist in the future), Skate is a game that makes doing a simple ollie over a big curb a rewarding experience. Simply put, it’s a skateboarding simulator. It isn’t that the controls are all that complicated. In fact, they’re fairly simple. The player flicks the right control stick in different ways to do different ollie-based tricks, while the other stick and buttons do the rest of the work. This creates a feeling of actually doing something to complete a trick rather than just pushing a button, and thus the feeling of accomplishment when you land even the most basic moves.

2. The beginning of the single-player career mode of the game features a full-motion video using pro skateboarders to fill different roles in the story. I don’t know whether it’s nostalgia or what, but seeing an FMV cutscene made me extremely happy. It brought me back to the days of the Playstation One and being blown away by real, live video in a game.

“Holy shit, its like a movie!” we would all exclaim with delight as the game moved from live action video to clunky polygons, our imaginations inexplicably able to connect the two completely different representations of game characters and settings. There was something beautifully silly about the whole thing.

Now for some examples.

The unbelievable classic intro to Resident Evil:

Here's a scene from the "game" Night Trap. It'll make us all wish we had bought Sega CDs and 3DOs:

Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2, or How to Burn Through Your Retinas for Less than 1200 Microsoft Points

2008-07-31T13:36:00.003-05:00

I threw down my magical, pretend Microsoft money (if you give them a debit card number, it'll transform your bank account into imaginary Microsoft funny money that digitally springs forth unto your Xbox), and I bought myself Geometry Wars Retro Evolved 2.

I don't have a lot to say about it. It's fun, highly addictive, and gorgeous. The six different modes of play are all creative twists on the original, and each is really challenging. Plus, if you crank up your speakers and shut off all the lights, you can pretend you're dancing at Ibiza while completely blasted on some pills that some dude with a ponytail made of grease gave you in the bathroom, and that's what most games are really aiming for, right?

KOTOR will rev your Motor

2008-07-21T08:30:00.006-05:00

I've just started playing Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic for the original Xbox. I'd always heard what an amazing game it was, and I saw it at the game store for less than five bucks, so I picked it up. It was made by Bioware, the same studio that later created Mass Effect, and the games share a lot of gameplay concepts and atmosphere.

I have to be honest and tell you that the first few hours of the game were excruciatingly boring for me. This wasn't helped by the fact that the game doesn't run all that smoothly on an Xbox 360. There just isn't a lot going on in the first two or three hours of play, and I'm not an enormous Star Wars fan to begin with (at least, not anymore), but I stuck with it and am having a good time now.

The main reason I wanted to write this post, though, is that I am pleased as punch with the name I gave to my main character. I think it is both appropriately Star Warsy, and makes me giggle every time I see it. My Jedi goes by the name of Krat Dickdoo, and now I can't stop saying Dickdoo. Try it out. You'll see. The world is full of Dickdoos.

Thinkin' bout Suda

2008-07-20T15:49:00.006-05:00

There’s a thin line between compellingly mysterious and strange, and just weirdness for weirdness sake. It seems that the line’s location changes from individual to individual. Mulholland Drive, for example, is an amazing cinematic experience for some and a pile of hogwash with a hot girl-on-girl scene stuck in the middle of it for others. A few years back, I ran across a game that brought this conflict to the video game world. It was a game that felt like Takashi Miike, David Lynch, and John Carpenter were captured and forced to make something for the Nintendo Gamecube. It’s called Killer7, and I absolutely loved it.

I’ve played the game through a couple of times and I'm honestly still unable to explain even the most basic concept of the game. It seems to have something to do with an assassin that goes by the name Killer7 because he has seven distinct personalities that not only manifest themselves psychologically, but physically. It is never explained how this could be possible. In fact, almost nothing in the game is explained, but somehow, for me anyway, the game works. The atmosphere (both visual and audio), characters, unexplainable events, and strange gameplay is so baffling that it just made me want to dig deeper and deeper into the experience. It’s unlike anything that I’ve played, equal parts disturbing and fascinating. It is truly a “you’ll either love it or hate it” piece of work. Rarely does a video game get made and released that creates wildly different opinions from major reviewers, and Killer7 got everything from 1.5/10 to 8’s and 9’s in the gaming press.

Soon after playing the game I learned more about the man behind it. His name is Goichi Suda, and he often goes by Suda 51 (apparently, his last name in Japanese sounds like the word for ‘51’). He’s a former undertaker who loves Franz Kafka, the movie Paris, Texas, and lucha libre pro wrestling. It seems that Suda 51’s tastes are as eclectic as his games. He’s the kind of creator that puts style and mood on the top of his list of priorities, a dangerous move that’s always on the verge of backfiring. So far, he’s been able to pull it off with the two games he’s made that were released in the United States. The style and feel of the games are so overpowering and beautiful in their way that those elements become the substance, and give the experience a depth that is much harder to get a hold on and evaluate. This is why there are dozens of obvious things that naysayers could list as to why his games don't work or are bad, but it is much more difficult for proponents explain why they do work.

The other game of his that’s available in the US is called No More Heroes and was created for the Nintendo Wii. It isn’t as powerfully unsettling as Killer7, and is a much lighter game. The game itself is a sort of satire of the kind of video game that it itself is (does that make sense?). It’s a mixture of extreme violence and junior-high humor that makes fun of violence and junior-high humor. It follows the exploits of a citizen of Santa Destroy, California named Travis Touchdown, an otaku nerd who bought a real light-saber on the Internet and starts killing people for money. He’s a nerd living out the ultimate nerd fantasy of power, violence, and action figures. The gameplay is simple and fun, the story is intentionally ridiculous, and it’s full of funny pop culture details, and again, it is unlike pretty much anything else that I’ve played.

So, Mr. 51, I guess what I’m trying to say is please keep up the good work. I hear that you’re currently working on a game with Hideo Kojima. This makes me explode with delight.

Love,
a big fucking nerd.

Destroy the Earth? (A) Yes, or (B) No

2008-07-13T15:30:00.006-05:00

This video may bring this question to mind.

My recent obsessive Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 1, and Half-Life 2: Episode 2 playing brought me to the following YouTube clip. I'm unsure whether it signals entry into the final stages of humanity's cultural decay or a glimpse at an undiscovered peak of profound absurdity. Either way, it makes me uncomfortable. Feel free to not watch all of it.

It was created using Garry's Mod, a program that allows players to mess around with Valve's Source game engine (which was used to make Half-Life 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal, etc.).

Random factoid: At one point in time, there were rampant rumors that Quentin Tarantino was actively trying to get the rights to make the Half-Life movie. No one ever proved it, and Valve denied that he had ever contacted them.

Some Stuff for Some Other Stuff

2008-06-30T19:47:00.002-05:00

Hey everybody. I'm going to be writing some stuff from time to time for Intelligent Gamer, so check it out. My first thingy for them is a short editorial about some Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare concepts that got my noodle churning. It's right here if you want to read it.

Here's a fun little song someone made from Call of Duty 4 gun sounds:

And, here's a little trailer in case you've never seen or played the game. A quick review: really good one-player campaign with amazing online multiplayer gameplay. Stab your friend in the back with a survival knife!

"Sexbox?"

2008-06-11T22:43:00.006-05:00

I started playing Mass Effect yesterday, and I'm really impressed by the world that the folks at BioWare created. The story is filled to the brim with sci-fi cliches, but the presentation and depth of the game universe and it's characters is so impressive that it all, actually, works beautifully. Honestly, the game has reestablished my faith in science-fiction in general, and that's saying a lot. A handful of gameplay faults aside, it really is that well done. The Mass Effect controversy, if one can even call it that, is old news, but it's new to me suckas, so check this Fox News insanity out if you haven't yet partaken:

I've played Mass Effect for about five or six hours, and I already can vouch for the inaccuracy of everything that is said by the Fox New employees. The poor dude from Spike TV is obviously the only one involved with the "debate" that has played the game, and he's given about thirty seconds to point out the enormous inaccuracies of the other guests. What's interesting is that Mass Effect is a big-budget, blockbuster game. Can you imagine a panel of individuals coming on a national news program and saying that The Godfather is a movie that's mainly about sex and boobs, and that the violence in it is damaging kids' minds, after admitting that they've never seen the movie and probably haven't seen a movie since about 1946? (This isn't to say that Mass Effect is The Godfather of video games, but I think it gets my point across.)

Trust me, if a thirteen-year-old dude wanted to jack-off to a video game, Mass Effect would be last on the list. "Oh man, I totally want to watch some hot alien-chick porno action. Well, I got Mass Effect. I'd better crank this thing on, play for about 20 hours, and make sure that I develop a good, loving relationship with this character through my hours of conversation-wheel choices. Then, I'm totally going to masturbate and vote for Obama."

Dr. Snobby replies in the following manner:

If you can't trust a guy named "drsnobby," who can you trust? Am I right folks?

Metal Gear Solid Envy

2008-06-10T10:40:00.004-05:00

Damn the Gods! I want to play Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (you gotta love the goofy, overly dramatic title) so badly it hurts my soul. I'm afraid that this is going to be somewhat of a raving fanboy post, so bear with me. MGS 4 is honestly the only game that makes me wish I had a PS3 right now. If I had the money, I'd buy a PS3 and the game, play through it in a marathon fashion, and then sell them both back, but alas, I'm as broke as a joke in a yolk. Being $40,000 in debt (thanks a lot, education) and employed only part-time at the moment isn't exactly conducive to purchasing $400 gaming machines and $60 games.

The head honcho behind MGS 4, Hideo Kojima, is like...well, I'm not sure who he's like. It's difficult to compare him to creators in other mediums. He makes successful, high-profile, incredible, and sometimes incredibly odd, games that change in tone from super-serious political thrillers to slapstick comedy in the blink of an eye. He's one of probably only a handful of game directors, that I know of, that can be called an auteur. When you play a Kojima game, the experience is always recognizably Kojima-esque. It feels like nothing else but a Kojima game. He's the type of designer that's unafraid, even with multi-million dollar budgets on the line, to try innovative, batshit crazy things. The best and most referred-to example is the Psycho Mantis boss battle in Metal Gear Solid in which the character read your actual Playstation memory card and commented on your game choices. The battle also involved unplugging your control and plugging it back into the second player port and faking the player out by making it appear as though your TV malfunctioned.

I just wanted to vent my frustrations at not being able to play this bad boy the week it comes out. I'll probably get to play it in a year or so when the PS3 drops in price and/or I have a job that pays more than a shilling a week. Long live Snake, mustachioed or not!

Fun Factoid:
Here's the cover of the first Metal Gear game for the NES and an image from The Terminator. The artist may have borrowed a few elements from the movie still, laziness that I can appreciate.

Crackdown Vs. Hangover

2008-06-06T10:21:00.007-05:00

Well, I’ve been playing Crackdown, and I’m goddamned loving it. This is the first game (in the limited selection of next-gen games that I’ve played) that actually delivers on all those promises of “sandbox” and emergent gameplay. And yes, I know this game is old news, old as the hills and twice as dusty, in the cutting-edge videogame world, but hey, “F” you. I got student loan bills, sucka. I don’t’ have sixty bones to drop on Ninja Gaiden II or GTA IV. This is a poor man’s video game site. Okay?

Crackdown takes place in a near-future city that’s been completely taken over by three powerful gangs. Each gang controls a section of Pacific City, and you play as a super-powered, genetically enhanced, cybernetically badassified police officer working for “The Agency” who has been assigned to assassinate all of these gang leaders, martial law style. Yawn, yawn, yawn. “The Agency?” That’s the best they could come up with? But actually, the clichéd, plain-as-vanilla setting and story (or lack thereof) work really well for what the game is. I think that more depth in the back-story would ruin the dumb fun of Crackdown. It’s a little like the baby getting an expensive toy and playing with the box that it came in, Crackdown is that empty box. The gameplay is totally unstructured in that you can defeat the gang leaders in any order you want and in any way that you want (although the game nudges you into taking the gangs on in a particular order by making one gang incredibly powerful, one fairly weak, and one somewhere in between). Your character has several attributes that can be leveled up by performing actions related to them. For example, shooting a gang member adds points to your firearms attributes, while picking up a car door and throwing it through a gang member adds to your strength attribute, etc. One of the great things about the game is that when you level something up, you REALLY level something up. You go from being able to pick up a dumpster to being able to pick up a dump truck, from jumping over a car to jumping over a building. That sense of ability advancement makes the game addictive. You find yourself saying, “just a few more (insert attribute) points, and then I’ll quit” over and over.

But where Crackdown shines is in its exquisite farting around. I find myself spending more time just running around the city and getting into trouble than completing the missions. One particular hung-over morning (that’s hung-over in real life), I spent an hour standing on top of a cargo truck as it drove around the city and shot rockets at gang, civilian, and police vehicles alike. My booze-induced headache drifted away as each exploding car was hurled towards the heavens before falling from the sky, burning bodies being flung left and right. I felt like a kid again, gleeful cruelty and all. The game really is a superhero simulator. It feels like someone took all of that childhood fantasizing about what you would do if you had superpowers and crammed it into a game disc. Crackdown basically says, “You have all these superpowers and weapons and vehicles, what do you want to do with them?” and then drops you into a huge environment to go nuts. The fun of the game comes from the simple actions of playing the game, all of the game mechanics, from the simplest to the most complex, are inherently entertaining on their own, and that is what makes what seems to be a simplistic, even vapid, game continuously satisfying. The incredible game mechanics paired with it’s emptiness and vagueness make for a great gaming experience.

To sum up: In Crackdown you can jump real high, you’re strong as a motherfucker, you can blow up shit big time, and you can do whatever the hell you want. It makes me feel like a ten-year-old, rocket-launcher-wielding Incredible Hulk whose been let loose in the world, and that's a good feeling to experience.

Here are some goofballs enjoying some of that emergent gameplay on Xbox Live by building a pile of automobiles and placing some explosives on top just to see what happens:

BioShock or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Shoot Ayn Rand in the Face

2008-05-20T13:38:00.005-05:00

Well, I finished my first Xbox 360 game the other night. It was BioShock, developed and published by 2K Games and designed Ken Levine. It’s a first-person-shooter set in 1960 in an underwater city built by an Ayn Rand-inspired Objectivist by the name of Andrew Ryan. Apparently Ryan got sick of paying his taxes and feeding all those lazy jerks just laying around during the Great Depression, so he grabbed a bunch of smart folks and built a utopian city at the bottom of the ocean where things like a government regulated economy, religion, and “primitive” morality wouldn’t hold him back.

The game begins with you, the player, lighting up a cigarette as you enjoy yourself during a commercial oversea flight, but unfortunately, you are not in a video game called Relaxing Flight. The plane malfunctions and crashes into the ocean. When you get to the surface you see, inexplicably, a lighthouse, and after swimming to it and discovering an elevator you descend into a mysterious city called Rapture. Through the course of the game you find that Rapture has erupted into a kind of Civil War between Andrew Ryan and a 1940s gangster-type guy named Fontaine. The scientists of Rapture, not being constrained by religion and/or government regulation, have developed genetically engineered powers to sell to the citizens of the city on a completely open market. As you play the protagonist gains more and more of these abilities, from shooting lightning bolts from your fingers to shooting bees out of your wrists, as well as finding and upgrading conventional weapons like shotguns and pistols. The city is filled with citizens, called Splicers, who have been driven insane with the genetic upgrades and crave a substance called ADAM that can only be harvested from other humans by genetically engineered, test-tube grown, little girls called Little Sisters. This means that the player must also get ADAM to upgrade his own abilities from the Little Sisters, but the Little Sisters have been given a laboratory-created protector, the Big Daddy. The Big Daddy is a giant man placed into a diving suit and armed to the teeth. All he cares about is destroying anything that threatens his Little Sister, and a lot of the big, exciting battles in BioShock come from these encounters with Big Daddies.

The game has been drenched in praise since it was released and appeared on lists all over the place as one of the best games of the year. It’s been lauded for its highly original concept and setting, gorgeous production and design, and treatment of morality and philosophy. For the most part, I have to agree. The game’s look is just plain beautiful. It’s like an art nouveau, steampunk horror movie, and this really sets itself apart from the endless parade of clichéd military, sci-fi, and horror shooters out there. The game is also just plain fun to play. Running around the environments, killing psychopathic Splicers, and learning more about the history of Rapture is great stuff, but where I can’t fully agree with the praise is in the morality/philosophy department.

BioShock is seen by many as an example of a video game that challenges the player with philosophical and moral dilemmas. I have to disagree with this. While I do think that the game has a mature story and characters that are much more interesting than the usual evil genius versus good guys stuff, I think that BioShock’s high-falutin’ ideas and moral choices are largely brainy window dressing on a superb, but ultimately not all that revolutionary, first-person shooter. The praise for the moral choice element in the game come from a gameplay mechanic in which the player must choose to “Save” the Little Sisters he grabs, or “Harvest” them. If the player saves her, he simply sucks some of the ADAM from her body, she turns back into a regular little girl, and she runs away. If the player chooses to harvest her, he sucks all of the ADAM from her and she dies. Basically, you can save her for a little reward or murder her for a much bigger one.

I love the concept, but the problem, for me, with this part of the game is that if you save the Little Sisters they eventually reward you with ADAM anyway, so in the end, the moral choice really doesn’t change anything for the player. In my opinion, anything in a game that does not directly affect the way the game actually plays is, like I said above, window dressing. This is not to say that window dressing is not important. Much of what makes BioShock special is its highly detailed and well though out tone, story, characters, setting, and overall look, but nobody would give a shit about any of that if it were no fun to actually play. For me, the game would have been much more interesting if you never were rewarded the extra ADAM for saving the little girls, if saving the girls actually prevented you from getting all of the abilities in the game. This would make the choice a real choice to a game player because it would affect how they actually experienced the game.

This is something that most people who don’t play video games don’t understand. Video games are only going to evolve and become more complex by evolving what makes them different than other forms of art and entertainment, and that difference is gameplay. It doesn’t matter how many curse words, how many sex scenes, how intricate the game’s plot is, or how realistic a game looks, if the gameplay isn’t sophisticated, it’s not a sophisticated game. Pac-Man and Half-Life 2 are both great games because they are viscerally exciting to play, even though one consists of a wedge-less yellow circle eating dots and the other is a narrative shooter about surviving in a near-future Earth that’s become a police state run by trans-dimensional aliens. My point is that they both feel fun to play, and if that’s missing in a game there is no amount of story, setting, or graphics that is going to affect the player, emotionally, intellectually, or otherwise. That’s what video games are good at, at giving the player a visceral experience that no other medium can provide. I don’t really care, emotionally or in any other way, about the characters or story in Resident Evil 4, but I am actually experiencing a real kind of fear when I run out of ammo and a giant, screaming mentally handicapped gentleman is chasing me with a double-bladed chainsaw. It’s a fear that my mind understands to be simulated, I know that if my character in the game gets his head sliced off, I don’t die in real life, but my body might not be so sure (sweating palms, quickened heart-rate, yelling “oh, shit,” etc.).

(Images above from Half Life 2 and Pac-Man: Championship Edition)

So, back to BioShock. BioShock is fun to play, and it can be scary and exciting in the way that I described above. It’s just that it isn’t the philosophical mind-blower that many critics want to champion it as. I do certainly appreciate the game’s attempt to bring something new to the big budget gaming arena, and I would recommend it to anyone, but if you want something that challenges you intellectually and emotionally on a gameplay level, you’re going to have to check out a better attempt like the games Passage and Gravitation by independent game designer Jason Rohrer, but that’s a whole different discussion.

P.S. BioShock has loads of great Noir, B-movie dialogue. My favorite line is when a guy yells at you, “You don’t fuck Fontaine. Fontaine fucks YOU!”

P.P.S. The game tells its story without using cut scenes. The player is always in control and it makes for a much more immersive experience. The only time, besides the ending scenes, that you’re forced to watch story elements is very cleverly integrated into the narrative. Thumbs up for that, 2K Games.

This Blog: The Sequel, The Movie, The Game: Redux

2008-05-10T11:16:00.004-05:00

Hello everyone, or probably more likely, hello nobody. I've haven't updated this blog in a very long time, and as you may have noticed long ago, I've deleted all of my old entries. The reason for this is that I never felt I had any sort of direction or unity in my posts, and while this is okay for some people, and I like to read other blogs that consist of anything and everything a person wants to write about, it is simply not how my noodle works. I need structure, dammit. I need purpose and focus to be able to produce. Now that I'm finished with my undergraduate education (at least, I hope so, I haven't gotten my final grades back yet, knock on wood paneling), I should have a little more time to dick around on such things as blogs, movies I want to watch, books I want to read, and video games, and hopefully, I'll be able to find employment before this computer I'm typing on is sold to an overweight, tattooed gentleman behind the counter at Pawn-o-Rama. So, you ask, what is this new focus, this new direction? Well, my friend, it is a union of two of the activities I spoke of just a few sentences ago. That's right, the new Adventures in Lollygagging formula is as follows: blog + videogames = a, hopefully, not entirely boring or derivative web log of one man's personal journey through electronic gaming. I know that there are a gazillion video game websites, blogs, magazines, vlogs, podcasts, and video podcasts, so I'm going to try my best to make this thing at least a little different and interesting. So, check back soon for my first official post!

(Image note: This is from Pro Wrestling for the NES. Due to my brother's professional wrestling fanaticism, it was one of the first games our family ever owned.)