Year: 2007

Review – Bioshock

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About halfway through Bioshock, I had concocted three different introductions to use in a review.

Then I lost my saves.

Word to the wise; don’t transfer your offline gamertag onto Xbox Live at 2 in the morning. Bad things will happen. They did to me, and I had to play the entire first half all over again. Doing this was a blessing in disguise, as it showed me a few things about the game that were not evident the first time around. Then the second half taught me even more. Let’s get right to the point; this is a good game. Is it a great game? Some will feel it is not, as there are most certainly a few problems here. Is it a work of art? This is an even tougher question to answer. Not because the game fails, but because it challenges the medium like few before. There are going to be dozens of articles about the dynamics between the Big Daddies and Little Sisters. →  50 Cent: Readproof

Review – Dungeons and Dragons Tactics

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Finally, a Good Original Game for the PSP

The PSP has always befuddled me. Here you have a visually excellent system with pretty decent processing power and storage capabilities, yet one of the biggest electronics companies in the world can only manage to wrangle a handful of good titles for the system. No kidding, I can count the number of PSP games that I enjoy playing for extended periods on one hand. Now I need to add one more finger because Dungeons and Dragons Tactics is a pretty sweet game.

Beware the forbidden forest of split pea soup!

This review is going to be pretty simple: if you like Dungeons and Dragons and you like turn-based tactical strategy games, you will like D&D Tactics. I, for one, am not a fan of D&D but that is due mostly to the people who have played and run the games I have tried to enjoy. Most role playing veterans have stories about the stringent rule-enforcers who exist in every gaming group; when I played, I was the only person who wasn’t a rule-Nazi. →  Ridge Reader V

60…45 Reasons to own a PSP

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PSP Fanboy started a series of articles back in June extolling the wonders of the PSP. The 60 Reasons to Own a PSP series was written (by a reader of the blog) to illuminate how amazing the PSP system is. And amazing it is, with reasons such as “Has buttons” and “Runs on electricity” on the list, there is no denying the PSP is the best system ever

Realizing any reasons beyond “has good games”, “costs less than the PS3” and possibly “not fatal if ingested” were unnecessary, videolamer wrote a parody of the article that simply looked at a bunch of DS games and labeled each game a reason to own the DS. We sent PSP Fanboy the article but have yet to hear back from them. They are too busy writing their 60 reasons, perhaps.

We got many negative responses to the DS article. The PSP list is better because it’s not just games was a popular complaint, following only “U sux go fuck urselv” in frequency. →  Garou: Mark of the Posts

Review – Mario Party 8

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Mario Party 8 is great for those who love board games, but don’t have a properly calibrated floor to play one on. I was so bored playing the required 80 hours of remedial shoots and ladders needed to unlock all of the party games that I started to appreciate Warhol’s “Sleep”. The party games combine the all the fun of watching real estate infomercials with the innovation of watching a marathon of real estate infomercials.

  No disrespect to Tom Vu, however. In his infomercial, this late 80’s real estate mogul turned seminar hawker/ pimp had a waterfall that he built using the leftover chicks from the playboy mansion. And best of all, he would act like he never saw them. He would give the original crib tour and walk by as if he just had a non-woman waterfall built of regular rocks and Waterfall-Mart bought supplies. He didn’t have a Wiimote, but Mario Party 8 is still many bikini waterfalls short of even having the radness of Tom Vu.
 →  Xenosaga 2: Jenseits von Gut und Pöst

Review – Civilization IV Beyond the Sword

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One of my biggest critiques of the Civilization Warlords Expansion was that I felt Firaxis had produced just enough content to make the game worth buying, and not a smidgen more. Being a Civilization fanatic, I had no choice to buy it, but my hope was that the next expansion, when it came out, would be more satisfying. In the months coming up to the release of Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword, I began to get giddy as a schoolgirl (I even found myself shopping for plaid skirts) that this expansion would deliver. I was not disappointed. And my new skirt fits really well.

I’ll breeze over the stuff you’ve already read elsewhere (or seen in the game): new leaders, new civilizations. There are more of them, an they are in fact delicious. My one critique is that I feel that many of the new civs have unique water-based units, and I generally feel that those are weaker than their land-based counterparts, unless you’re playing an archipelago map. →  Reading more, assemble!

GT5: Prologue adds car damage, finally becomes a real driving simulator

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Reported by Kotaku, Gran Turismo’s father, Kazunori Yamauchi, has stated that a few key features are being implemented into the teaser version of Gran Turismo 5, dubbed Prologue. Things like realistic car damage and a “Professional” physics option are getting added as per fan request, and all I can say is: holy shit, took you long enough!

The Gran Turismo series has always been labeled as the most realistic driving simulator ever created, but that doesn’t say much when you can ram your Sprinter Trueno into a wall head-on at 120 mph and see no damage.

Apparently Polyphony Digital has realized that cars, in fact, do not bounce off of walls, and has added damage to their physics model, much like what Forza Motorsport did on Msoft’s Xbox 360. Also included is the integration of this truly innovative feature in your opponent’s AI, which proves how un-simulator-like all GT’s have been up to this point.

Supposedly, the main reason we haven’t seen realistic damage models until now has been the cost of getting the car manufacturers to give Sony permission to fuck their cars up. →  You think about everything.

ASCII art game – Shoot ‘Em

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When it comes to Youtube vids made of ASCII art, quality can hit or miss. But this is the first time I’ve seen it used to make a 3d game. The name is Shoot ’em , and the concept is simple – use your ASCII gun and ASCII mines to blow up ASCII shapes so they don’t crash into your ASCII ship. old schooley techno plays in the background. Also, you can run out of ammo. It is 3d and mouse driven, and while not the most thrilling game ever, it is a sight to behold.

In case you are wondering how the game works – it looks to use a custom image conversion layer in OpenGL (thanks to Tringi for pointing this out to me!), which is pretty damn impressive if you ask me.

Give it a download. Images don’t seem to be easy to get for this one, so use your imagination until you play it.

Expansion Packs, Add-ons, Sequels, and Other Crap the World Doesn’t Need

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I love the Sims. I am hopelessly addicted to the nutty little people that live in their own world on my computer. I am so hooked to this virtual crank that each time EA kicks out another goofy expansion pack for it, I bite and grab myself a few new locales or items for my little demented Sims to play with. The Sims is a completely genius game while at the same time, a totally evil one. It is a game that is groundbreaking in a multitude of ways, but for me, one specific trait stands out: The Sims franchise, for better or worse, made expansion packs and add-ons a norm of gaming. Sure, there were games before that did it and had success but no game boasts the breadth of expansion-y goodness that the Sims has on the market.

Enough of the Sims, I am here today to talk about expansion packs. Everyone these days has an expansion for something. →  Readalations: Persona

Metal Gear Silly 4

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I should begin this blog with a disclaimer – I have played all of the Metal Gear Solid games, and sooner or later I know I will play 4. With that out of the way, I want to say that the hype for MGS4 can get puzzling at best.

Now I’m not saying that the game deserves no hype. Anything MGS is guaranteed to get people talking, and for good reason. It just seems weird. Unless I wasn’t paying attention, it felt like MGS3 had the least amount of hype and talk before its release, and yet it for my money its the best game in the series. Now with MGS4 we get a new trailer ever few months, and from just this we’ve got floods of comments where people are already claiming it to be the best game of this generation. I guess all Kojima had to do was revert back to MGS2’s “goofy but absolutely serious” universe instead of MGS3’s “goofy and it damn well knows it” style. →  Four out of five dentists recommend reading more.

The Bioshock Occlusion

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HateComputer

My PC is stout. A 3.2ghz Quad core, 8gb RAM, GeForce 7950 SLI (x2) beast with a raptor managing triple boot, 2tb of SATA storage and a 1000 watt PSU to keep the cheesy blue cathodes and 8 case fans humming wildly in PC mod rapture. I can run any game at any resolution (yes, even with the months old 7950s) at hundreds of FPS. It makes little girls cry, old men shit themselves and, if the moon is just right, can grab hold of the minds of all within a forty block radius and twist them to my devious desires.

So I guess it only makes sense then that I bought Bioshock for the 360.

I was given a choice, you see. The PC version was right there next to the xBox version on the special Bioshock end-cap at my local blue-shirt-crap-shack. The hardware requirements were paltry in light of the aforementioned rig and I have long held that the only way an FPS can be properly played is with a mouse and keyboard, or keyboard analogue. →  I’m so excited, my braces are tingling!