Year: 2010

Runegate – When Sales Beats Common Sense

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Riot Games finally released a feature for League of Legends that has been begged for since the game’s inception: additional rune pages. For those of you who aren’t familiar, runes are one of the metagame features in League of Legends that allows you to customize your gameplay. You get a series of different slots, and can purchase runes that buff various attributes of your character: movespeed, damage, mana, health, etc. This enables additional strategy for the game, and runes can only be purchased via “Influence Points,” a currency that is only earned by playing the game (win or loss), as opposed to “Riot Points” which are only gained through real money transactions.

Up until yesterday, players only got two pre-set rune pages to choose from in a match. →  Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Bore me and I sleep.

Review – League of Legends: Season One

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Following many months of “live,” but not “ranked” gameplay, League of Legends, published by Riot Games, has gone pro, launching their competitive Season One. Featuring several ranked ladder modes: “solo” (actually solo or duo play) 5v5, full premade 5v5 and full premade 3v3, the ladders will culminate with tournament play and $100,000 of cash and prizes. Although Riot will not release simultaneous usage numbers, they have confirmed through various online sources they have over 3 million registered accounts. With the DOTA community estimated at 7-9 million players built over a decade, Riot should be proud of how quickly their game has caught on and distinguished itself in broad field of incumbents and competitors.

Unsurprisingly, Season One is mostly more of the same. →  Prince of Postia: Article Within

The Passion of Tetris

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Back in the day, a passion for video games meant a healthy interest in video games as part of a normal, balanced diet. These days, anything than less than full retard could see you harshly labeled as a newbie on some internet forums. But unlike wine or film it is hard to be a connoisseur of the whole of gaming-kind. There are so many games that humans cannot tell you how many there are any more. Thousands? Certainly. Millions? Maybe. It depends. Is every slight mod a separate game? Is every two second flash game a ‘game’? Do not seek the answer to those questions young one, to seek to answer them is to look into the void. By far the best thing to do if you want to really make it in the video game sector is to hyper focus on one tiny tiny tiny bit of gaming. →  You do not simply walk into reading more.

Sounds

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I may have already mentioned ALREADY JESUS CHRIST ALREADY GET OFF MY BACK MOM ALREADY! That I am a big fan of video game soundtracks. Be it the official tunes, an inspired remix and very occasionally I even allow songs which have merely sampled an OT to creep onto the MP3 player. PRO TIP: Never ever, ever be tempted to listen to a video game related song which has been filed under the ‘comedy’ or ‘humorous’ genres. They are almost exclusively 11 year old boys who sound like girls on helium doing the first season Pokemon theme tune. Tetris remixes aside, of which team videolamer are veritable connoisseurs, I do like hard copy soundtracks. They are often objects of beauty as well as magically trapping the music onto a disk.

 →  All the lonely gamers, where do they all belong?

The New Xbox 360

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The release of the newest version of the Xbox 360 came right before I prepared to move to my own apartment, where my roomate’s console would be unavailable for the first time in several years.  Perfect timing I guess, though there are always caveats with console hardware revisions, ones which make all the new features a little less exciting. Rather than research what these might be, I decided to buy the new 360 blind.  Here is what I have found:

– Microsoft continues to rip off their pals at Sony and Nintendo when convenient.   The new hardware has a touch sensor for the power button and disc eject, and it makes beeps when turned on and off.  That makes it work pretty much like a PS3, and when placed next to one, it kind of looks like a cancerous growth with a radioactive green glow to it. →  When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity. When many people suffer from a delusion it is called a game.

Features for Monster Hunter 4

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I try to deny it but I may have secretly been interested because it’s on the Wii and as any Wii game review on most major sites will tell you over and over again the system lacks a plethora of high-quality third-party titles. Maybe it’s just that I don’t have a PSP and the series has always somewhat appealed to me. Whatever the case, I think Pat put it best when he said, “I thought the game would be fun because we could play online together but it’s legitimately a good game.” I agree, Monster Hunter is better than I expected.

Still, there are a few things Capcom could have done better to really capture that hunting spirit (I say this from a position of absolute authority as I have never been hunting in my life). →  Ask not what this post can do for you - ask what you can do for this post.

Review – Fragile Dreams

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I had high hopes for Fragile Dreams. It seemed to have an unusual story, focused on post-apocalyptic loneliness and exploring a more or less empty, shattered world. And, even after moderately bad reviews, I looked forward to trying out what I still hoped would be a good game. After all, Opoona and Baroque both got worse reviews, and in my opinion they are a couple of the best third-party titles on the system.

Then I started the game. And therein lies the problem. Fragile Dreams, despite its nifty artwork, decent plot, and great music, purports first and foremost to be a game. And although it does not completely fail at being a game, it does come pretty damn close. It has a decent atmosphere – chilling, occasionally with that edge of tension that only decent survival horror games can manage – and then you get into combat and everything turns awful. →  Welcome to read zone!

Review – No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle

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No More Heroes was a fine game, but it was one that worked best as a solitary experience. Parodies of gamer, geek, and otaku culture are a tricky business, and the game managed to address this issue well. Going for it a second time around would be pushing it, and having to reconcile the true ending of its predecessor would probably cheapen it in the end.

But really, it was the pessimist inside me that made me most concerned about NMH2. One of the E3 trailers indicated that the protagonist, Travis Touchdown, was going to start fighting as only the 50th ranked assassin. I knew there was a snowball’s chance in hell that Grasshopper Manufacture (or any developer, for that matter) was going to come up with fifty new boss battles to fight. →  Read me now, believe me later.

PSP RIP

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It finally happened.  After almost three years of excessive abuse and fairly steady play, my PSP-1000 has reached the point of no return.  It still runs, but not well, and at this point I don’t think I’ll ever get it to read Memory Sticks.

Rather than try to fix the damn thing, I decided to replace it whole hog with a brand new 3000.  Normally I’d be the first to smack myself for such a sudden lack of fiscal prudence, but when I have 20 games for a console, with more coming, I tend to lose the urge to shop around (at least at a certain price point).

Anyway, I’m enjoying the new 3000 quite a bit.  I can see the screen problems that gamers have reported whenever it plays a 2d game, but I haven’t played enough of them  to determine whether this will be a true detriment.  →  Take your stinking paws off me, you damned dirty article.

Review – Flower, Sun and Rain

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My first thought when I began playing Grasshopper Manufacture’s “Flower, Sun and Rain” was that it reminded me a bit of Killer 7. This isn’t any sort of surprise, considering Grasshopper (and it’s rebellious leader Suda51) was behind both games. It was, however, an informative revelation; Killer 7 is often praised for it’s unique audio and visual design, but as it turns out, these concepts were already being played with in FSR. The game features a well dressed protagonist, a mysterious briefcases, and character voices that sound like garbled computer voices. You could even argue that the the primitive visuals are an attempt at basic cell shading.

Flower, Sun and Rain, then, is indicative of our awkwardly evolving awareness of Japanese entertainment. →  Now you’re reading with power.