- BioShock — A city under the ocean (not Atlantis) is populated by murderous psychopaths. Everyone here also has superpowers. A little girl and her dozen twin sisters wander around needing to be rescued. Andrew Ryan talks to you about why his city is so great. After you kill everyone in the city the moral of the story is that killing children is bad. (Chance to prove that videogames can have moral messages just like movies?) I think this game could give people a lot to think about, like how it’s dangerous to give everyone in a city inherently destructive superpowers.
- BioShock Infinite–A city in the sky is populated by an evil Tea Party analog (to prevent moral ambiguity make sure their eyes burn and they roar like monsters so there’s no confusion over who the bad guys are).
Opinion – Final Fantasy 13
For weeks, I have been trying to write something, anything, about Final Fantasy 13, but the task has proven difficult. One reason is that anything worth saying about the game has been stated already, and by better writers. Another is that I continue to suffer from the longest period of writer’s block I have ever encountered. Recently, I came to a third conclusion about my struggles; you can’t say much about a game that itself has no point. That’s the best way I can describe FF13. It exists as multiple pieces and components, none of which work together to create a unified experience.
This problem runs throughout the entire product. Take the environments, for example. They serve no purpose beyond offering the player a new color palette every few hours. → Read the rest
Extra Lives Review
Tom Bissell’s latest work, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, doesn’t include much discussion on the subject of why video games matter. This has very little weight on the text itself, but I think every reader should be aware of that fact before opening a copy. Extra Lives is about Bissell’s fascination with videogames and videogame developers, and about his own experiences playing games. The basic point of the book is, well, I can’t really say. Any central thesis has gone far over my head because as far as my reading comprehension extends I couldn’t find any real point to the book. Each chapter is tied to the others by the fact that it’s about videogames. Videogames: that’s basically the point of the book.
Is it a good or a bad book? → Read the rest
Review – Burger Island
I recently [not recently – Ed.] spent a good portion of my Memorial Day weekend remembering our fallen soldiers by playing Burger Island with my daughter.
“Do you want a turn making milkshakes, daddy?” she asked in a cute manner.
“I will do it! I will do it for those that died at Normandy!” I cried.
And thus began my nightmarish decent into the maddening world of Burger Island.
Burger Island, I learned the hard way while simultaneously paying tribute to the ultimate sacrifice of others, is a lie.
The island in the title is not a gigantic delicious hamburger. It is not a Burger Island. The point of the game is not to gorge your stranded survivor on the island itself in the name of survival, slowly eating the very piece of juicy, flame-broiled land that also keeps you safe. → Read the rest
Review: Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
Presumably, there is a design doc at Square Enix that defines what defines a Crystal Chronicles game. A character called Cid, cactuars, marlboros, flans, chocobos, airships, trains and magical jewelery are all borrowed from the main series. What makes a Crystal Chronicles game seems to be an obsession with talking about crystals, carrying things above your head, real time combat and a world populated by four different races. What I didn’t know until I hit the Final Fantasy Wiki is that all of the Crystal Chronicles games are set in the same universe but thousands of years apart. Which is nice and explains the obsession with crystals.
In my little world at least, Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles titles are always released with little in the way of fanfare, especially when compared to the main series of games, and often received a mixed reception. → Read the rest
Review – SSX Tricky
In the early days of the GameCube one of the first games I made sure to get was SSX Tricky. It was awesome and I played it endlessly until I had mastered every single trick of every single character on every single course. Eventually I got bored of it because, well, it stopped being fun after doing the same “über trick” for the umptillionth time. It burned out my brain and I couldn’t take it any longer. From whatever was left of those brain cells lingered a memory of an incredible experience. Sometimes SSX Tricky would wander back into my daydreams and I would reminisce about how much fun I had. So you know what I did? I decided that nine years later it was time to play it again.
The game hasn’t changed much in nine years, other than the size of the TV I played it on. → Read the rest
Runegate – When Sales Beats Common Sense
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. This is quite limiting, as many runes are only useful on certain archetypes: for example, mage oriented ability power runes vs. → Read the rest
Review – League of Legends: Season One
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. On the cosmetic side, both the website and the game’s launcher UI received new snazzy themes and sound track. → Read the rest
The Passion of Tetris
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. → Read the rest
Sounds
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.
The New Xbox 360
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. → Read the rest
Features for Monster Hunter 4
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). → Read the rest
Review – Fragile Dreams
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. → Read the rest
Review – No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle
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 the rest
PSP RIP
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. → Read the rest
Review – Flower, Sun and Rain
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. These days, Western audiences still don’t get every game, anime or album that comes out of Japan, but at the very least, people will know of their existence. → Read the rest
A Lazy E3 Summary
This E3 was, in some ways, a reversal of what most gamers expected. Typically, we see everyone clamor over whether Sony or Microsoft came out on top, while we all wonder how Nintendo continues to bumble their way to success. This time around Nintendo schooled everyone, while both MS and Sony looked lost in their own ways. At least, that’s the general consensus that I have seen. From my perspective, Nintendo certainly did better, but I can’t say that anyone has lit my fire.
Breaking them down in order, Microsoft continued to slowly ape every successful feature on the Wii, while trying to find some angle with which to convince everyone that they have made it as good or better. The Kinect motion device is still in the same position as it was when it was called Project Natal: great potential that still hasn’t passed muster outside of a controlled environment. → Read the rest
Quick Take – Devil May Cry 4
Recently I finished playing Devil May Cry 4. Well, not finished finished, but I got through the final boss’ first form before giving up on the bullshit that happens immediately afterward. This game got quite a lukewarm reception when it first came out, and I wanted to see whether these critics were full of shit. As it turns out, they kind of were, in the sense that the game does more than it was given credit for. At the same time, it screws up in enough important ways that the level of quality attributed to it is about right. So I guess that makes it a wash, but there are still some ideas I’d like to discuss.
My first observation while playing DMC4 is that the new character, Nero, is not simply a change made for the sake of it. → Read the rest
The Epicest Clash Ever
Scholars have argued for hundreds of years over which belief system is the best and the jury is still out on the definitive answer. Is it the system with the most money? The system with the most followers? The system that fits in with current knowledge of how the universe works or is it the belief system that advocates fiddling blind kids and Africa dying from the AIDS? Sure, we’ve had global conflicts over some of these issues and even then the winner couldn’t be definitively decided. Now, however, through the invention of the Nintendo Wii, we can create the greatest match up of all time ever and finally see who is the best*.
Introducing the competitors:
Yes ladies and gentlemen here they are, four of the most influential people of all time. → Read the rest
Making Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Truly Rule
There are a whopping two arcade machine series on Earth that I can beat consistently on one purchase, regardless of sequel number or difficulty setting: Soul Caliber and Marvel vs. Capcom.
The key to Soul Caliber, you see, is Maxi and his awesome ability to start spinning his nunchuks, never pausing for a break as he beats the sweet bejeebus out of any and all opponents. Just mash the buttons, bimbo. Why didn’t you think of that?
And Marvel vs. Capcom 2? Iron Man, War Machine and Cable will destroy any and all challengers from their cozy little far corner of the screen, sending a constant and unfair barrage of projectile after projectile at those who dare to cross them.
Am I excited about the announcement of Marvel vs. Capcom 3? → Read the rest