loonyblog.

Xenosaga's biggest problem, wrapped up in a single sentence.

Picking up immediately after the final moments of the first game, Xeno II follows the returning Elsa crew as they arrive on Second Miltia to extract the Y-Data from MOMO's subconscious and turn over KOS-MOS to Vector Industries.

In my review of the first game, I dubbed this problem "WAYPTA". As in What are you people talking about? No game has ever had this problem as badly as Xenosaga. I'm kinda curious about the sequel, but I don't think I have the patience to put up with that much gibberish and new age philosophy, even if this game is half as long as the first one.

Marketing brilliance.

Other commands coming soon:

• /beer
• /twinkie
• /porn
• /hooker
• /tax return

T-minus seven days...

The chaos begins:

Almost enough to make me want a DS.

It's nice to see quirky Japanese games coming out over here. Katamari Damacy aside (that's actually a game with somewhat large appeal), we've seen some very weird games coming out over here...Ubisoft brought over Sprung for the DS launch, which was very odd indeed, and let's not forget about Feel the Magic XX/XY (or as it's known overseas, "Project Rub"). What's next? Princess Maker? Or even (dare I say it?) Sakura Taisen?

No, probably not. Sega announced that we would see a Sakura Taisen game over here, but has since grown very quiet on the subject. Somehow I don't think this country is quite ready for a strategy RPG with dating elements set in the early 20th century with teenage girls battling in giant mechs in Paris. I know I'm not.

A public service notice about this blog.

These include: Firaxis Games (sorry kids, this means no Pirates review from me), Civilization, 2K Games, Visual Concepts and Kush Games, and perhaps most significantly because of today's announcement...Bethesda Softworks, The Elder Scrolls, Morrowind, Oblivion, Call of Cthulhu and any related games. I'm still very much an Elder Scrolls fanboi, but due to my close association with the game, it's off-limits when it comes to this blog. (For the record, when I was told we would be publishing the game I giggled like a little girl for about ten minutes).

I also feel like I should point out that any prior posts about The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion on this site (and there were quite a few) were written well before I had any idea that I would be working for the company that would be co-publishing this game. I don't think anyone's going to accuse me of that, but I just want to reiterate that nothing posted on this blog is intended as anything but random stuff flowing out of my head. And whether this is about Superman or Oblivion, it's always intended to be read that way, not as subtle marketing.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled bits of geekdom. Enjoy.

For absolutely no reason...

1. Tetris (Multi)
2. Tempest 2000 (Jaguar)
3. Panzer Dragoon Saga (Saturn)
4. The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind (PC/Xbox)
5. Final Fantasy VII (PSX)
6. Doom II (PC)
7. Half-Life (PC)
8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (PC)
9. WarCraft II: Tides of Darkness (PC)
10. Sam & Max Hit the Road (PC)

When I thought about this list, I surprised myself by putting Half-Life above Quake 1, but as much as I love Quake 1 (and I do love that game), Half-Life is a better game. Also, Super Mario 64 used to be in my top 5, but it's certainly plummeted in the last few years as I've grown tired of most of the platforming conventions. I still think it's a great game, but every game on this list is one I fully expect to play over and over again for many years to come, and I can't say I'm all that motivated to play through Super Mario 64 again.

Still, not a bad list, if I do say so myself.

Well, gosh...that actually worked!

Sadly, no response as of yet from MacPlay regarding my NOLF2 problems. Of course, after neither game worked last night (plus Painkiller: BooH), I decided to try out the Halo 2 single player campaign, so that's pretty much what I'm playing now (so far? It's okay...but nothing spectacular. Maybe I've been spoiled by Half-Life 2). But at least I know when I'm done with this I can go back to BFME (or at least it looks that way from my preliminary tests).

I'm having one of those days...

So I load that up, watch the inane cut scene, and...bam! it crashes. Actually, that one more locked up than crashed, exactly. In any event, I wasn't going to play that today, so I decided to try my luck on my Mac. Yes, my nice, reliable Mac.

So I pop in the No One Lives Forever 2 install disc, and start up the installer. Bam! it crashes. Actually, it didn't really crash, it just did that thing where it opens and then immediately closes before doing anything (I hate it when apps do that). Okay, okay. So I copy the install files to my hard drive and try again. The install seems to work this time, but when I start up the game itself...bam! it does that annoying thing. Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargh.

Some days I don't know why I bother playing anything but console games. With my luck so far today, my Xbox is going to explode the second I try and start up anything.

Review: The Bard's Tale.

Probably the only significant bit of gameplay branching in The Bard's Tale comes at the end of the game. Much like the two Deus Ex games before it, The Bard's Tale has multiple endings that are determined purely by your decisions at the very end of the game. This is nice because it means it's reasonably easy to see every ending, but at the same time, it means the rest of the game is very linear (for an example of a better way to do this, see Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic). I won't spoil anything here, but at the end you're basically given a choice to be Good, Bad or Indifferent. The first two give you completely different boss fights and endings, but the last one (and I think this was very clever) actually lets you walk away. As in, throw up your hands and take the easy way out. I can't remember ever seeing a game that let you do that before, and I laughed out loud over that.

Frustration, thy name is DOS.

All of this is very frustrating, but it has made me appreciate ScummVM even more than I already do. Thanks to the ScummVM project, it's entirely possible to play dozens of classic, somewhat classic, and forgettable adventure games on Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Dreamcast, BeOS, UNIX, Palm, PocketPC and even more. I applaud the efforts of that team. Also encouraging is GemRB, a similar project for Infinity Engine games (think Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale and Planescape Torment). While those games actually run in modern Windows systems, most of those games were never released for Linux and/or Mac, so that's a nice project.

Aside from just plain getting the game running on well on XP, I'd love the ability to remap the controls from System Shock...those keyboard commands were far more complex than they needed to be, and there's no way to change them as far as I can tell. Oh, well. I guess I could just reinstall System Shock 2 and run it with the very cool Rebirth mod, but I really was looking forward to playing System Shock 1, not its very cool (and slightly better IMHO) sequel. Sigh. Maybe in another ten years someone will have figured out a foolproof way for it to work on modern systems, although by then I'm sure Microsoft will have changed the Windows file system another three or four times, and we'll wind up having to run a Windows XP emulator just to run DOS Box to emulate DOS.

The anti-Warshaw awards.

But where Shacknews dropped the ball, GamePro of all places has picked up. An article up on GamePro.com has a top 20 list of lows for the year. While I hate top 10/20/30/50 lists in general, it's a pretty comprehensive list, and I only disagree with a couple of inclusions. This isn't the only article of its kind to appear in the last few weeks, but it's the least cynical of the bunch, and well worth a read.

Goodbye to GameCube.

I'm selling my GameCube for one simple reason: I don't play the thing. Since buying the system several years ago, there have been only two decent games for the platform: Ikaruga and Soul Calibur II. As much as I like those two, they're really not that good, and there's absolutely nothing on the horizon for GameCube that interests me in the slightest.

These days, I'm no fan of Nintendo, and I make no attempt to hide that. I think Nintendo is making themselves too niche oriented for their own good, and they seem to be getting less and less relevant to the industry at-large with each passing year. Am I saying that the company is going to go under? No, I definitely am not. But the DS is everything I hate about Nintendo right now. It's a novelty, one that is kind of cool for about five minutes, but eventually gets tiresome. I don't doubt that Nintendo's going to make money on the thing (they already have), but I'll be surprised if anyone but Nintendo's own development studios manages to take advantage of the hardware.

I wanted to like the GameCube, really I did. But every game that came out was a disappointment to me. Metroid Prime was good but lifeless (no dialogue == suck). Mario Sunshine was a big let down. Zelda...well, I've never liked the series, so I can't say I was disappointed there. The only game I regret never getting to play is Paper Mario 2, but even that doesn't interest me enough to hang onto the system. I'm sure it's fun and all, but I always have Mario & Luigi for GBA.

Sadly, the future prospects for the system don't appeal to me either. Advance Wars was the one I had high hopes for, but they managed to screw that up by making it a third person action game. Resident Evil 4 should be pretty good, but I'm just burnt out on that whole genre (and if I change my mind, there's always the PS2 port). As for the new Zelda, it certainly looks less grating than the last one, but somehow I don't expect the gameplay to change much at all.

So will the GBA be the last Nintendo system I own? Quite possibly. SPOnG is hardly a reliable source, but this rumor (which didn't come directly from them) suggests that Nintendo's next home system will have a non-traditional interface. Considering Nintendo's recent statements about gaming in general, I wouldn't be at all surprised if this turned out to be the case. Since non-traditional interfaces do nothing but send me running in the opposite direction, I don't have much confidence in Nintendo's ability to make a game or system that appeals to me anymore.

A sad day indeed.

This was the only remaining reason for me to keep my GameCube, and my last hope for a really great game for the system. Sigh. I understand why it was canceled (it's still so far off that by the time it would be finished, nobody would want to publish it for GameCube), but still...it's such a shame.

Yikes!

- Operating System: Mac OS X 10.3.6 or later
- CPU Processor: PowerPC G5 or later
- CPU Speed: 1.5GHz or faster
- Memory: 384 MB or higher
- Hard Disk Space: 2.2GB free disk space
- Video Card (ATI): Radeon 8500 or better
- Video Card (NVidia): GeForce FX 5200 or better
- Video Memory (VRam): 64 MB or higher
- Media Required: DVD Drive

To be fair, they do say these are preliminary, but after seeing the less-than-spectacular performance of Halo on my G4, I'm not expecting it to be able to run Doom well, if at all.

One other thing: it's nice to see Aspyr, like other Mac game publishers, fully embracing DVD-ROMs. It's a cost-cutting measure I'm sure (1 DVD costs less than 5 CDs to package, I imagine) but it's the kind of thing PC games should have started doing years ago.

Definitely worth the wait.

I would be remiss if I didn’t take a few minutes to talk about Steam, Valve’s highly touted e-delivery platform. I like Steam on paper, and my version of the game was purely delivered by Steam, but the technology needs some time to get the kinks worked out. On my machine at the office it worked great, and I was playing Counter-Strike: Source in no time. But at home, where I wanted to play the single player game, I had quite a few problems. I quickly discovered that leaving Steam running in the background was a surefire way to make my entire machine come to a screeching halt. If it was updating a game while I was trying to do anything, it would crash my machine. Repeatedly. Also, I found the game would periodically hang on those “Loading…” screens. Once the game loaded it ran great on my X800 pro, staying at a solid minimum of 60 FPS, and dropping only occasionally (it’s worth pointing out that this is far better performance than I saw in Doom 3), but getting there was a bit of a headache. I’m sure these problems will all be worked out eventually, but as of right now, it’s a work-in-progress.

Homina homina homina.

By now you've already heard this a billion times, but I'm going to say it again anyway: this game is amazing. Simply amazing. Doom 3 looked great on my new video card and certainly justified getting it, but the framerate wavered a lot, especially when there were multiple enemies on screen. Half-Life 2 doesn't have that problem. It doesn't run at 60 all the time, but I'd say at least 75% of the time it is. And good god, is it ever stunning to look at.

I'll refrain from any more impressions...after all, I'm just a couple of hours in. But it's something special, that much I can safely say already.

At last an answer...

Review: Logitech Cordless Precision Controller for Xbox

I do have two small complaints about this one though. The first, is that while the gamepad itself has gotten significantly smaller and easier to manage from the original Xbox wireless controller, the base station has not. I realize that this is so the base station retains the dual-port expansion slots from the stock Xbox controllers, but it just makes it much bulkier than the svelte box that attaches to the PS2. The second is not really a fault of the gamepad, but just a problem with using a wireless controller with the Xbox -- if you want to use Microsoft's Xbox Live headset, you need to plug in a wired controller. Logitech's Cordless Headset for Xbox ships this week, and I might just round up all my now useless wired gamepads and sell them back to my local GameStop in order to get this instead. Being completely free of wires is so great, that it's a real step backwards every time I go to play on Xbox Live.

But really, those are minor complaints. This is a great piece of hardware, and I can just as easily recommend it as I can its PS2 counterpart. It's taken a while, but there are finally top-notch wireless controllers available for PS2 and Xbox. My GameCube is still out of luck, as I won't use the force-feedbackless WaveBird, but I use my GameCube so rarely these days, that it's not much of a loss.

So...many...games!

The games are more or less listed in priority order. I'm primarily playing that unnamable game, as that's single player only. But I'm also getting in quite a bit of Burnout 3 (which rocks), and I'm having a blast with the Crash tour. But I'm also playing Halo 2, although purely over Xbox Live for the time being (I'll play the single player campaign after I've finished my priority title). And then on top of all of those, I'm also playing Chessmaster, which is really a lot of fun, even though I suck at chess.

With four games already on the sidebar, I'm going to have a hard time finding room for Half-Life 2 when it comes out on Tuesday. Short of locking myself in a room this weekend to finish a few games, I think I'm going to wait a bit before I tackle that challenge.

But hey...isn't this holiday season great? I mean, can you remember the last time there were so many games being given perfect scores from major publications?

I'm sorry, what?

One day, a rather ordinary guy sees a really beautiful woman on the street. Before he can move to follow her, he finds himself holding a bag of goldfish. Apparently, the goldfish are ingested by a passerby who bumps into our ordinary guy. After helping him regurgitate the fish, the ordinary guy is recruited into a "superperformance group" called the Rub Rabbits. Their pitch to him is that the best way for him to see the woman of his dreams again is to stage an amazing performance for her. And thus begins your adventure.

How I fell for the Halo hype.

...I pre-ordered Halo 2.

Yeah, I'm a hypocrite.

So what on earth caused me to do that? A couple of things. First, was the review in this month's issue of the Official Xbox Magazine, which is pretty darn good (they gave it a 9.7, I believe). And then there's that great commercial that's hit the airwaves and the web, which looks really very cool.

But really what made me decide to go for it, was the fact that my long-overdue Amazon.com gift certificate from my credit card arrived this evening. I have an Amazon Visa Card, which I use for my travel expenses, and since I travel so much, I get lots and lots of Amazon gift certificates.

While that didn't cover the whole thing, it did bring the price down to slightly less than I was planning on paying for the upcoming Painkiller expansion. And while I still intend to get that at some point, if they're more or less the same price, I think I'll go with the one that offers something new (albeit only slightly). I also think this is a good move value-wise since of the two, chances are that Halo 2 is going to stay at full price for a long time (the original game only just came down in price). PC titles always plummet pretty quickly, and expansion packs even more so.

So I'm getting Halo 2 like a whole lot of other people. And a week later, I'm getting Half-Life 2. The funny thing of course, is that there's a pretty good chance that I'm going to still be playing that unnamable game (see sidebar) well after those games come out, so it'll be a while before I get around to playing them. But when I do, hoo boy, I'm going to have a ton of great stuff to play with.

So yeah, I fell for the hype. Hopefully the game won't disappoint. One game I'm definitely not falling for the hype over is Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, which even though I hear is really fun, just isn't anywhere on my radar. And that's not even mentioning the fact that Hideo Kojima has clearly lost his marbles. I don't care how good the reviews for that turn out to be, unless it's declared to be the greatest game ever made (and there are already three or four games out this season reviewers have used that phrase to describe), it'll be a long time before I get around to that one, if I ever do at all.

Review: Logitech Cordless Action Controller for PS2

With that all-important game I can't talk about occupying so much of my time lately, I decided to finally get a new controller for my PS2, as my two original launch PS2 gamepads are on their last legs. While I've always been down on any wireless remote, Logitech finally hit on the perfect formula with the Cordless Action Controller for PS2. Read on for my full review.

Continue reading "Review: Logitech Cordless Action Controller for PS2"

Fight the good fight.

I doubt much will come of this suit, but at least someone's doing something about it.

*grumble grumble grumble*

My review of Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay is up over at ShackReviews. I was delightfully surprised at how much I liked Riddick, even though I had relatively high expectations. Here's an excerpt from my review:

Riddick (as I will refer to it from now on, as the full title doesn't exactly roll off the tongue) is an interesting animal. It borrows quite liberally from games like Deus Ex and Half-Life, but it does so gracefully. This is a stealth-light FPS like Deus Ex, but it's also just as much a pure FPS like Half-Life. And if you're going to swipe from someone, it might as well be those two, which are among the very best games from the last five years.

Yeah, that's a freaking screenshot.

What!!?? No thrown items and crossbows? Hear me out here, because it will let you into our thought process. When we look at characters that like to do ranged combat, they mostly want to use bows and arrows. So instead of doing many types of ranged combat, we decided to stick with bows and arrows -- but -- it's a grand implementation of bows and arrows. You feel the string draw, arrows arc properly, bounce realistically, and stick deep into the right materials. You can see the quiver on your back and type of arrows you have and there are tons of different bows and arrow types. So we trade having several types of ranged combat done in an average way, and get bows done in a grand way.

In any event, the game looks just amazing, as evidenced by the screenshot below (did I mention that's all in real-time? I'm pretty sure I did). The official site has a cool Oblivion wallpaper image, although they only have it in 1600x1200 and 1024x768. Since my LCD's native resolution is 1280x1024, I letterboxed the image (after shrinking it to 1280x960) so it would look just right (example here). You can grab that on my .Mac page if you want it for yourself (and don't have access to Photoshop or any other graphics editor).

Tips for playing Outlaw Golf 2.

• If putting just won't work for you, use the shot predictor. In Outlaw Golf 2, you get three chances to see exactly where you're going to hit the ball when putting. Use it. Putting without it is next-to-impossible. When putting, look at the lower left-hand corner of your screen. See those "X" circles there? That's the number of times you can use it. Line your shot up, and hit the X button. Poof! You can see where you'll hit it. Once you get used to it, you'll wonder how you ever lived without it.
• Use the Ghost Ball! This is a similar concept to the shot predictor for putting, only for regular shots. Line your shot up (be sure to zoom in once or twice using the B button -- it helps enormously) and hit the X button. You'll see exactly where the ball will go if you hit a perfect shot (not accounting for wind). You only get to use it once per hole, but it's great for that all-important approach shot.

• Up those stats! Pick a character, go to the driving range, and increase their stats. It makes a big difference for putting, driving and other miscellaneous skills. Or if you'd rather level the playing field for multiplayer, create a game and turn off skills. Then everyone's got the same base level.

• Pick the right character. If you do decide to go with stats, pick one that suits your playing style. Suki and Killer Miller are the two most powerful (although they have to be unlocked), and personally I like to use Trixie because she's a decent all-around golfer. Plus she cracks me up and looks better in a cheerleader outfit than Ice Trey.

OMG CRAZY HYPE.

Incidentally, it's coming exactly one week after another unbelievably hyped game of the year, but I'm very much not on that bandwagon. I'll be the first to admit I've been roped into the hype-mobile for Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 (and that other game I can't mention because I work for its publisher), but for some reason I've been immune to the Halo 2 hype. Now don't get me wrong, here...I'm sure it'll be good, and it's at the top of my holiday wish list, but it's just not on my list of games I'll be buying this year, because I just don't think it's going to be that good. I'm sure it'll be a blast, and really enjoyable online, but compared to some other games (especially HL2 and that other unmentionable game) I just don't think it's going to get the kind of acclaim the hype's been suggesting. Aside from the fanboys of course, but those are the same people who will swear that Dead or Alive Ultimate is OMG TEH AWESOME even though we all know it's going to be just as shallow and button-mashy as the games it's a remake of.

Having said that, if I could do it all over again, I would have saved the store credit I used to buy Fable and used that to get Halo 2 instead. I had relatively realistic expectations for that game, and it couldn't even live up to those. I have relatively realistic expectations for Halo 2, but I'd expect the game to exceed those (if that makes no sense to you, just think of the stock market and earnings reports -- it's the same insane logic). I don't want to say that Fable was an utter waste of my time, but it's hard not to think that when there are so many amazing games coming out this year and that was pretty mediocre.

In any event, Half-Life 2's gonna rock. It's going to be the most amazingly kickass game this year and blow everyone away. Really. I mean it this time. Maybe.

Clever.

(Spotted on Idle Thumbs)

Fighting the urge to quit.

My primary issue with these games is one of math. They have it, and I don't like it. Games like Morrowind and KOTOR, and even the Fallout titles do a great job of hiding the math. It's all there, just enough out of the way where I don't feel like I need a degree from MIT to understand what the heck is going on. Neverwinter Nights, and all of these D&D RPGs (such as Planescape, Baldur's Gate and so on) don't hide it at all, and in fact, it's totally up front. As I've repeatedly said over the years, I don't like the pen & paper legacy, since I never played those games, and to me, these games always feel overly complex.

And NWN hasn't done much to dispel my revulsion to this math and D&D-influenced over-complexity. I'm literally fighting the urge every five minutes to stop playing. The reason I chose NWN over Planescape is that I figured being the more recent game, it's bound to have concessions for people like me. And thankfully it does, but the game still feels really overwhelming. I'm going to tough it out though, as I'm tired of having to explain to people why I've had a rare pristine copy of Planescape: Torment sitting on my shelf without ever having actually played the game. Actually that's not true...I have tried -- twice even -- but both times I balked at its complexity. But where I eventually gave away my copies of Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, Icewind Dale and the rest of those games, I hung on to Planescape.

Incidentally, if anyone has any advice for dealing with this sort of thing, I'd love to hear it. I know I'm in the extreme minority on this one, which strikes me as being really strange, because I look at the complexity of a game like this and wonder how on earth it managed to sell so many copies. KOTOR I get. Baldur's Gate, not so much. But in any event, I'm going to conquer this once and for all, or die trying under the weight of all this math.

When hype goes awry.

When it was first announced over three years ago, Peter Molyneux told everyone that Fable, then known only as “Project Ego” would quite simply be, “the greatest RPG ever made.” Of course the idea behind the game he was talking about was (and this is a direct quote from Dene Carter of Big Blue Box), “simply to allow the player to evolve his own unique character and to ensure that nearly all decisions and actions he takes have some effect on the world, its opinions, and even its physical makeup.” Had they actually created that game, perhaps it would have been the greatest RPG of all-time, or at the very least a truly groundbreaking one. Sadly, the game that was released as Fable bares little resemblance to that idea. It’s not a bad game to be sure, and in fact, it’s quite fun at times. But sadly it’s neither groundbreaking nor particularly original, and many, if not most of its original concepts have any affect whatsoever on its gameplay, world or inhabitants.

Hideo Kojima has completely lost his mind.

But even if you're willing to buy into that lunacy, this has got to make you wonder...at the Tokyo Game Show, Kojima announced that the monkeys from Ape Escape will actually appear in the game. Take a look at the screenshots. What the hell is this guy on? I mean, it's weird enough to have people spouting that kind of dialogue, but to have cartoony monkeys wielding barrels running through the game is beyond the pale. Maybe they only show up after you've found the "special" toad or something...or maybe if you've managed to break in to Snake's secret stash. Either way, it's one more reason why I think MGS has made itself completely irrelevant. In a post Splinter Cell world, why would anyone bother?

What's really sad about all this, is that Kojima really was brilliant at one point. For all its obvious influences, Snatcher was a great game. I'd much rather have an English-language version of Policenauts than another nonsensical Snake adventure.

Molyneux's mea culpa.

Reading this is pretty strange. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Molyneux, as Populous remains one of my favorite games of all time and it was also the first networked multiplayer game I'd ever played (direct-dial 1200 baud, baby!). But Fable was relentlessly hyped from day one, and the finished product is very, very different from what we were told to expect. I'll go into specifics on all of that in my review, which I'll probably post later this weekend, but basically if you're expecting an open-ended and epic RPG you're going to be horribly disappointed. I wasn't, so I'm not, but I am a bit sad that the game doesn't live up to its own potential.

Oh, and for the record, just to follow-up on an earlier post, I never once died playing the game. Not once. I never even needed to use a resurrection phial, and I had tons of them by the time I finished the game.

In any event, this Molyneux title may have been a bit disappointing, but I'm still looking forward to The Movies. And don't even get started on Unity. I don't claim to understand or know anything about it, but I just know it's gonna rock. After all, the head Llama said so.

I am the greatest gamer who ever lived.

I've never died. Not once.

I'd heard this game wasn't particularly challenging, but this is a bit surprising. I've never even come close to dying. You're given "Ressurection Phials" that will automagically bring you back to life if you die. I've got a crapload of these (you find them everywhere), but I've never even had to use one!

Now, there are a few possibilities here, like maybe the game's totally unbalanced for a Barbarian-style character like mine. Or maybe it's just that it's really, really, really, really freaking easy. But I like to think it's simply that I am supreme overlord over all RPGs. Bow before me puny mortals, for I am your god. Muahahahahahahah.

Okay, maybe the game's just too easy. I'll have to take more boasts to play quests in the buff. The last few times I've done it I still made it through largely unscathed.

Review: Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon

The move to 3D has caused for some changes to the general format of the game, but by and large, the gameplay is quite similar to the first two. Like the second game, you'll control both George and Nico at different times, although you'll never have to switch back and forth between the two, and it's split about 60/40 in George's favor (maybe a little more). Incidentally, just like the second game, the game opens with George and Nico far apart from each other. I actually like that they’ve done this twice already…somehow their relationship seems more sophisticated and interesting if they haven’t settled down into marital bliss between games.

Regardless of who you're controlling at any given time, you'll walk around looking for clues, talking with characters using Revolution's preferred method of icon-based dialogue choices, and solving puzzles. Because of the move to 3D, you'll find yourself having to solve quite a few by pushing around boxes and crates. While this may conjure up images of the lame box puzzles in games like Tomb Raider and Soul Reaver, rest assured that these are actually pretty clever (or at least as clever as you can get with a box puzzle). Having said that, the sound effects when moving those boxes around are a bit harsh. I mean I realize that they're heavy, but I was afraid poor George was going to give himself a hernia by the end of the game.

Good, but no System Shock 2.

Not too long ago, I played a really scary game. It was played from a first person perspective and took place on a haunted space station inhabited by zombies, mutants and other creepy creatures, and was a truly terrifying experience.

That game was System Shock 2.

Doom 3 is many things, and at its best, it is indeed a little bit scary. But it’s hardly the scariest game I’ve ever played. It’s not even in the top three.

But really, who cares? id Software may not have created a game I wasn’t able to finish because of how freaked out I was (to date there’s only one game that can claim that: Thief: The Dark Project, and that’s just because of the zombies). But what they have done is crafted an exceptionally polished game that’s fun, and is easily the best looking game I’ve ever seen.

(P.S.: Yarr!)

Hotchie motchie.

But I'll say this: The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion looks insane. If that's what PS3 and Xbox 2 titles are gonna look like, we're all going to be doing the happy dance very, very soon.

Countdown to Oblivion.

Okay, so I'll confess, I've actually already seen PC Gamer's Quake IV article (I haven't read it completely, but I skimmed it pretty heavily). We got our copies in the office on Thursday. No, I won't tell you about it (once the issues hit subscribers I will, but I don't want to leak anything in advance), but it is very exciting. Quake IV will be very cool. But Oblivion? Hooooooooo boy does that ever look insane. Word on the street is that the game really is using the Unreal 3 engine (this isn't official -- we won't know for sure until the GI issue hits), and as the cover image clearly states, this is being targeted for Xbox 2, PS3 and next-gen PCs. Outstanding.

Incidentally, I think it's not hard to understand why Bethesda got the Fallout license over Troika. Troika may have people who worked on the original games, but take a look at the test screens for their post-apocalyptic RPG. I'm not saying they don't look cool, but let's face it...they're not exactly cutting-edge. Not that the Fallout series has ever been cutting-edge, but there's no reason why it has to stay that way. Plus of course, Bethesda's last RPG sold millions of copies more than Troika's first two games combined, but that's beside the point. Bethesda's looking towards the future, while Troika is decidedly less so.

It's also worth mentioning that I couldn't be happier for the people at Bethesda to be getting this kind of attention. GameInformer has the highest circulation of any gaming magazine in this country, and getting a cover over there is a big deal. And the fact that Oblivion is the first demonstrable next-gen console title is an even bigger deal. The folk at Bethesda are really great guys...after the phenomenal sales of Morrowind for Xbox (which continue to this day -- it's still on top-ten sales lists for the platform), I figured they'd be courted pretty heavily for the next-gen systems. It's nice to see them come out on top like this.

My Elder Scrolls wish list.

For those who missed my Morrowind review (or my Bloodmoon or Tribunal reviews, for that matter), I freaking loved the game. It's one of my favorites of all-time. So like any self-respecting fan, I've got a few wishes for the sequel. Here's what I'm hoping for:

• A new engine: This is a big one for me. Ditch the NetImmerse or Gamebryo (god, could they have picked a worse name for that?) or whatever the heck they're calling it these days, and license the Unreal engine. An Elder Scrolls game with the Unreal 3 engine would be absolutely insane.
  
  
• Make it next-gen only: Similar to the last one, make the game for next-generation consoles and video cards only. I suspect this is probably the case, as it's been rumored for a long time that TES4 would be an Xbox 2 launch title. Considering how well Morrowind sold on Xbox, I suspect Microsoft wants this as much as we do. The one possible snag? Bethesda's long said that they need a hard drive for a TES game, and that's why they never did a PS2 game. Ever seen the size of those Morrowind save files? They're huge. If the Xbox 2 doesn't have a hard drive, this may cause a problem. But I imagine Microsoft would work with Bethesda to find a solution.
  
  
• Make it BIG: Considering how enormous Morrowind was, this isn't in doubt, but I'm not talking about the size of the game world, I mean in general. Make it a huge undertaking. Current rumors suggest that the next game will be called The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, and will feature the world thrown into chaos. Now that's what I'm talking about here. I want to see the kind of spectacle no other developer would even consider. Morrowind with a really dark slant to it. Woo...that would rock.
  
  
• More lifelike NPCs: Two years ago, Todd Howard told me that while their editor does allow for NPCs with detailed schedules (and mods have taken advantage of it), they took it out to make the game more accessible. I suspect it was also one of those things taken out to make the game ship on-time. With enough time to develop better NPC technology, I hope they work day/night cycles and NPC schedules into the game a bit more. It's my only complaint about the game as far as realism is concerned...being able to walk into a shop at 3 in the morning and have the same guy standing in the same place he is at 3 in the afternoon is a bit jarring.
  
  

How to make the scariest game of all time.

Heck, even a remake of System Shock 2 with this engine would be the scariest game of all time. I honestly don't think I could play that game. It would freak me out too much.

Truly groundbreaking.

Ladies and gentlemen, the barrels in this screenshot...aren't explosive. I'm not joking. I actually shot them a few times, expecting them to explode like every previous barrel in this, or any other FPS I've ever played. But incredibly, these don't seem to contain explosive material. I'd heard of such things in the Real World^TM but I never expected to see such unprecedented realism in a first person shooter. Truly groundbreaking stuff here.

Games I'm buying this year.

Continue reading "Games I'm buying this year."

OMG TEH SHACK IS FAMOUS.

My (brief) impressions of Counter-Strike: Source.

As I am a (legitimate -- no eBaying here) owner of Counter-Strike: Condition Zero, I, like about a billion other people, was let into the open Counter-Strike: Source this evening, and have braved the impossibly busy Steam servers and returned with some very brief impressions of the game. No shockers here, but if you're curious, read on.

Continue reading "My (brief) impressions of Counter-Strike: Source."

So uh...

Don't get me wrong -- it's beautiful, but it has a few major problems. Number one, is that you'd have to have a ungodly behemoth of a machine and the world's greatest internet connection (not to mention an even bigger monster running the server) in order to get a solid 60 FPS in a four player game.

But the larger issue is just the gameplay. It's slow. Very slow. The best I can figure, the only way to really get into it, is to play it like you would the single player game...hide in the shadows, be very, very careful, and take out your opponent(s) very slowly. The problem, is that if you actually try doing that, you'll be accused pretty quickly of being a camper. Which of course you are, but that's the point, then isn't it?

The tournament mode is definitely better than the straight-up deathmatch, but even that grows tiresome after a while. While I've only been playing it for a day, it seems like id's made a kickass single player game, with a relatively ho-hum multiplayer mode.

Ordinarily that's what I'd expect from any new FPS. The only reason I bring it up at all, is that id's made three of my six favorite multiplayer games of all time (in no particular order, that list would be Doom, Quake 1, WarCraft II, Q3A, Tribes and Counter-Strike). So I'm a bit disappointed. Oh, well. Back to single player then. Until the CS: Source beta starts up (look for my thoughts on that whole concept soon), I'll stick to Painkiller for my multiplayer needs.

How sweet it is.

Okay, so wrong Doom. But you know what I mean. After some tweaking, it's running great on my setup. I'm using the Very High detail setting, in 1280x1024 with 2x anti-aliasing and I'm getting an average of 40 FPS. I could probably crank up the AA a bit, but I see no reason to...I'm not seeing any jaggies anywhere. I must say that I disagree with Kyle when he says it's not necessary at all -- it definitely is noticeable without it, even at that resolution.

But who cares at this point. It runs, it runs great, and it looks stunning in its native resolution on my LCD monitor. From this point on it's all about the gameplay.

Bloody brilliant.

Painkiller isn’t the greatest game I’ve ever played, but it’s certainly one of the most pure and fun first person shooters ever made. It’s so simple, and so over-the-top, that rather than be a short stop on my journey to Doom 3, I found myself having the time of my life. Enough so, that I opted to wait a week to start playing Doom 3 (allowing me to finish Painkiller and also return from a business trip).

If you haven’t seen the game yet, it’s a pretty simple idea. Developer People Can Fly has distilled the first person shooter genre down to its bare essentials. You run, you shoot and you occasionally jump, but that’s it. No use key, no NPCs, no puzzles, nothing. Just lots of running and lots of shooting.

Maybe I'm just the biggest nerd who ever lived...

How I'll be running Doom 3.

Here's my rig:

So there you go. It's not a perfect setup, to be sure, but it's pretty damn good I'd say. Of the parts, the weak spot is really the CPU, but there's no reason for me to upgrade at this point. The next time I upgrade anything will be a ways away, and when I do, I'll get a new motherboard/CPU combo (and most likely go 64-bit at that point). But that's not going to be for a really, really, really long time, since this can run Doom 3 at Very High Quality, and will more than likely kick ass at Half-Life 2 as well.

It took me a while, but I've finally got the temperature inside my case down to a relatively frosty 40 - 45 degrees C. A big part of that was my recent addition of the Thermaltake heatpipe and CPU fan, which are a huge improvement over my previous heatsink, which was AMD's stock heatsink/fan. With that thing running, my case temperature was at least 10 degrees hotter, and my CPU was getting so hot (even without overclocking) that the system would force-restart on its own during CPU-intensive apps. Not good at all.

For anyone that's curious, I'm using a CompuCable 2-port ADC to DVI KVM switch to share my monitor between my Mac and PC. This baby's amazing. I get full quality on both machines with zero image degredation, and because both my monitor and keyboard have USB hubs on them, I'm not just sharing the monitor, but also the keyboard, mouse, printer, bluetooth and joystick adapter.

But I'm very pleased with my setup. Or at least, I am for now, anyway. I'm sure once the next-next-generation AMD processors come out I'll be filled with geek lust all over again. But that's what makes all this stuff fun.

The greatest show on earth.

Anyway, I'm totally psyched. I've been to six E3s, but not a single Comic-Con, and I can't wait. I'll be naturally pretty busy with work stuff, but I'm hoping to find some time to be able to wander around with my digital camera. Look for pictures when I get back on Sunday.

Today's random gaming news.

• It's hardly minor, really, but Namco announced today that Katamari Damacy, the big rolling ball of crap game, is coming stateside. Hopefully it won't go for more than $30, because I really can't see myself paying full price for it. But if it is that low (or the price drops relatively quickly), I can't wait to get my hands on it.
  
  
• Apparently the PS2 version of Viewtiful Joe will be released in Japan as Viewtiful Joe: A New Hope. No word on whether or not Viewtiful Joe 2: The Empire Strikes Back or Viewtiful Joe: Episode I: the Phantom Menace are on the way.
  
  
• In Active Xbox's interview with Microsoft's Larry Hryb is a list of the top 15 Xbox Live cities around the globe. Checking in with such cities as New York, London and Tokyo is none other than Brooklyn. Word.
  
  
• And lastly tonight, Nintendo, who long ago realized the value of a new paint job, has announced a new emerald-colored GBA and "starlight gold" colored GameCube in Japan. Hope those work out for them.
  
  

Muhahahahahah.

Before, my score was around 1,500. After? It's over 9,100. Now that's what I call an upgrade!

(For the record, yes, I know that 3DMark isn't the most relevant benchmark in the world...but I don't care. It's eye candy, and I'm not reviewing this for any serious hardware site, just my own edification).

Bam.

In a wonderful bit of serendipity, mere hours after the Doom 3 announcement, my card shipped from GameVE.com. It should be in my hands in a week, giving me plenty of time to prepare for Doom's August 5th release date. Life is good.

Now I just hope I'm not traveling that week...

Finally, some good news.

Both of these were really, really unexpected, but at the same time, both make so much sense. There is no doubt in my mind that Swingin' Ape can deliver a kickass game in StarCraft: Ghost, and since their deal with Blizzard applies to other properties as well, we might see some great titles down the line as well. Similarly, Bethesda's bound to do a heck of a job with Fallout 3. Their press release says it all, with Todd Howard stating flat out that they intend to concentrate on "the hallmarks of a great RPG: player choice, engaging story, and non-linearity."

I'm as giddy. Not only that, but given how far off this is likely to be, it may turn out to be one stunning looking game. There have been some pretty substantial rumors that The Elder Scrolls IV is being planned as an Xbox 2 launch title...if that's true, and Fallout 3 uses the same level of technology...hot damn.

Both are likely to be a ways off, but I'm as psyched as can be.

CD overload.

You would think that the success of the DVD version of Unreal Tournament 2004 would be enough to get publishers warmed up to the idea of DVD-only releases, but apparently not. On the other hand, Mac publishers have long embraced the idea. My OS X version of UT2k4 shipped on a single DVD, and it seems like every major Mac title (including the just-released Battlefield 1942) is also exclusively in DVD-ROM format.

Were there a DVD-version of Doom 3, I'd have definitely gone with that for my pre-order, but sadly there wasn't one. One thing's for sure...I'll definitely be picking up the DVD version of Half-Life 2 (as Valve's already confirmed there will be one). That's the primary reason I haven't pre-ordered the game yet, actually.

The changeover is inevitable, but it's taking really long to switch. It took a while to leap from 5.25" to 3.5" floppies, but the leap to CD-ROM was comparatively quick (due to the obscene difference in space between the two). I suppose there's a novelty in knowing a CD-ROM drive from ten years ago will be able to install and run Doom 3 (albeit rather slowly), but this is a long overdue change nonetheless.

Gentlemen, lock up your wives.

That Saturn pad.

Actually, those are both great, but what I really can't live without is this one that lets me connect a PS* controller to my GameCube. That's super-cheap (under $10!), and is an absolute life-saver for any game that relies on the d-pad (like Wario Ware, Soul Calibur 2 or the GBA adapter). Not only is it inexpensive and very handy, but it fully supports force feedback when used with Dual Shock gamepads. Pure genius.

Bring it on.

Oh boy, here we go...

Of course what exactly I'll upgrade to is a slightly harder decision. The real choice for me is whether or not I'll buy a 9800 Pro, which is still great, and much more affordable now, or the newer, and naturally more expensive, X800 Pro (not Platinum, that's overkill). As we're buying an apartment (whee!) this is probably my last significant purchase of any kind for the foreseeable future, which means I probably won't be upgrading my game PC for at least two years, possibly more. So with that in mind, I'll probably go with the X800. It's more than I need for now, but in three years, if I'm still using the same video card, that extra power will go a long way.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Doom 3 ain't gold yet (as far as I know), so I'm not making this decision right this second. We'll see how much longer it takes to get Doom 3 in the can (hopefully long enough for those X800s to come out in larger supplies).

Review: Deus Ex: Invisible War

Among us shackers (and seeing as how I’m no longer an employee I find myself as just another lay shacker myself these days), ShackHype is a dangerous and fickle thing. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of middle ground…when a game comes out, it’s either the greatest thing since sliced bread (or Counter-Strike, whichever you think is a more significant invention) or it’s a steaming load of somethingorother. ShackHype has been responsible for pointing me towards several truly amazing games (Battlefield 1942 comes to mind immediately), but as Deus Ex: Invisible War proves pretty conclusively, ShackHype is not law. The hype on this game was largely negative, which lowered my expectations significantly. On the plus side, this meant that the resulting game (which I enjoyed quite a bit) was a pleasant surprise. But at the same time, there are lots of Shackers who skipped the game because of the ‘hype, and to be perfectly blunt, it’s their own damn fault, because while it’s a bit flawed, it’s a fun experience, and a solid and thoroughly enjoyable sequel to a great game.

Needs more Punch-Out.

A decent gaming art book?

The Nintendo problem.

Nintendo's Satoru Iwata has issued his latest tirade (nice to see the legacy of Yamauchi hasn't left the company) at their annual corporate strategy press conference. The subject? What's wrong with the gaming industry. And this, dear readers, is the subject of my rant this evening, because in my humble opinion, there is nothing wrong with the industry.

Continue reading "The Nintendo problem."

No you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.

GameSpot: Caen on Interplay: "We're still here."

Review: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

I must admit, going into it, I certainly never expected to really like Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance all that much. Oh sure, people have been telling me for years that this is a great, great game, but I saw that Baldur’s Gate logo and immediately figured that it wasn’t for me. But then I stumbled across the game on sale for around $10, and well…the bargain hunter in me simply couldn’t resist. And what a bargain it turned out to be! Incredibly, not only is this game a ton of fun, but it looks as good today as it did (presumably) when it was first released nearly three years ago.

Well I'm speechless.

First impressions: Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance

For the record, I am playing the original game, and not its sequel, which was recently released. It's been sitting on my stack for a while now, but really, it's not the oldest on my stack by a long shot (one game's been on there for over four years). Anyway, I'm playing the Xbox version, so naturally it's going to look a bit prettier than the other versions, but really, this game looks great. The framerate's rock-solid,the characters are nicely animated and have realistic lip-synching, and damn, that's some pretty water. It may be a couple of years old, but you really wouldn't know it by looking at the game. Considering that the original (PS2) version of this game was released nearly three years ago, that's pretty impressive.

Like I said, I'm only just getting started with the game. But I figured I'd tap my virtual hat towards the apparently highly skilled developers at Snowblind Studios. So now my question is, why didn't anyone force me to play this earlier?

Metal Gear espionage.

The LAPD are investigating the incident and are looking for two 19-20 year old males. The code snatchers were able to gain access to the PS2 demoing Snake's hotly anticipated jungle rumble by cracking the perspex case on one of the pods on the Sony stand.

Review: Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars

I suppose the true test for any adventure game is how well it’s stood up over the years, and Broken Sword has stood up perfectly. The gameplay wasn’t gimmicky and never relied on large numbers of non-interactive sequences, so the game remains every bit as much fun now as it was then. And thanks to ScummVM, it’s easily accessible on any platform supported by the emulator. Adventure games may have fallen out of popularity of late, but that’s no reason why even the most jaded gamer can’t enjoy a classic title from the mid-90’s. I can’t believe it took me this long to find and play Broken Sword: Shadow of the Templars, but boy am I glad I finally did. It’s not just a great game, it’s one of the finest adventure games I’ve ever played – and I’ve played a whole lot of them over the years.

Post E3 thoughts.

Continue reading "Post E3 thoughts."

Sweeet.

Well, it's a step in the right direction...

Now this is what I'm talking about!

Early E3 thoughts.

As for the event itself, it was a bit disappointing. Aside from the big EA on Xbox Live announcement (which everyone knew was coming anyway) there really wasn't much to get excited about. I thought the Halo 2 demo was nice, but they didn't show me anything that will convince me that Halo 2 will be a worthwhile multiplayer experience. In this post-UT2k4 and Battlefield age, I have my doubts that any game that attempts to do both single and multiplayer at the same time can compete.

Aside from that, there were some other highlights worth noting: Jade Empire looks great, and is probably my most-anticipated game of the year. Fable looked significantly weaker than it had in past years, but this is the first time I saw it that I actually thought it was a game, and not just a tech demo. That's a good sign. Republic Commando looked decent, Conker looks like fun, and Kameo looks...like Kameo. it's still the same game it was the last ten times I saw it.

The lack of Xbox 2/Xbox Next/Ybox/Josephine info was a let-down, but I wasn't expecting anything, just more of the XNA crap we got (actually, I won $5 on that).

Hopefully some good stuff will come out shortly. Already we've seen the Nintendo DS (w00p), and I can't wait to see the PSP. And apparently Sega's press conference is tomorrow, which means yesterday's news about The Matrix Online may not have been their big announcement (please be Panzer Dragoon, please be Panzer Dragoon).

Off to E3.

Obviously I won't be writing up coverage for anyone this year, although I'll probably post some after-show thoughts here either when I get back next weekend, or during the week if I have the time (and not completely exhausted).

One cool thing about this year: this is the first year I'm getting in early enough to attend Microsoft's pre-E3 event. I won't be there as press, but it should still be interesting nonetheless.

My (completely fake) E3 predictions.

Continue reading "My (completely fake) E3 predictions."

Yeesh.

Here's an excerpt from Eurogamer's article that explains why the game has this title:

The idea apparently is that Goldfinger is locked in a war with Dr. No for control of a massive criminal organisation (we can guess which), and that your aspiring henchman gets to rise through the ranks, customising and upgrading his villainous abilities along the way, and fighting alongside or battling against various Bond characters including the aforementioned Ms. Onatopp, bowler-hat-chucking Oddjob, Scaramanga (he of the Golden Gun fame), Pussy Galore, and of course Goldfinger himself.

So then, you might be wondering, why is it called GoldenEye? Because, it says here, your nameless henchman lost an eye in an encounter with Dr. No, and Goldfinger's technicians replaced it with... a... golden... eye... Nice one, EA.

The funny thing is that it sounds like a good idea for a game, so why on earth did EA bother swiping the title like that?

This is totally nuts.

Note to Revolution: GET MORE QA TESTERS.

As for Broken Sword, since you can only keep one save game per file, there's no way for me to jump back to avoid the bug without starting over completely, something I don't like doing (I did it with Legacy of Kain: Defiance, but that's a very rare exception), and I'm even less likely to do it for a GBA title, where I usually don't spend more than twenty minutes at a time playing. Fortunately I recently ordered the PC version of Broken Swords 1 & 2 from Sold-Out, so I guess I'll just restart the game using ScummVM instead. But it's a shame, because I was really enjoying this rare handheld adventure game.

Don't toy with me...

Sega's dragon not grounded

Despite a recent Internet hoax and Panzer Dragoon Orta's less-than-stellar sales on Xbox, The Q hears that yes, the dragon will fly again. A new title, allegedly much closer in style and tone to Saturn's cult hit Panzer Dragoon Saga, is expected to surface soon.

Review: Final Fantasy X-2

After completing Final Fantasy X, Squaresoft (now Square Enix) faced a pretty formidable problem: the next game in the series, Final Fantasy XI, was being developed as a massively multiplayer game (don’t even get me started with that logic…why they couldn’t just call the damn thing Final Fantasy Online is beyond me). Which is all fine and good, but that meant Square would have no single player Final Fantasy until FFXII, which was quite a ways off. And so the decision was made to produce what can only be described as Final Fantasy on a Budget, or as it was titled on its release, Final Fantasy X-2.

FFX-2 really is Final Fantasy on a Budget. Corners were cut in every conceivable way, and the result is a cheap feeling game, with a shoestring storyline that exists only to connect the various side-quests that are passed off as core objectives.

Am I too picky?

So I thought about that a bit, and looked back at some other games I've played recently that I found very disappointing in the story department: Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Beyond Good & Evil, XIII, Xenosaga, AoM: The Titans, WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, and so on. All of these had storylines that were either cliched in the extreme or just under-developed, and at least the first two were widely praised for something I seem to have missed. So the question that I can't quite answer is this: am I too picky?

I don't think I am, but then, I suppose it's possible. I approach games like I do movies and novels. I expect to see likable, well reasoned characters who do things for logical reasons. I expect the storyline to be at least somewhat original. I expect the dialogue to be at least remotely natural sounding. And most of all, I fully expect the story to have a beginning, middle and an end. Leading into a sequel is one thing, but the abrupt way that BG&E ended is inexcusable as far as I'm concerned.

So what games do I consider to have great stories? Any Legacy of Kain (yes the gameplay is lacking, but they all more than make up for that with complex and original plotlines), Fallout 1 & 2, Panzer Dragoon Saga, Final Fantasy VI, VII, VIII and X, Chrono Trigger, StarCraft + Brood War, WarCraft III (but not its add-on), Morrowind, Half-Life, and so on. I intentionally put a mix of the action, RPG and strategy genres in there to give you an idea of what I'm talking about.

Is it unreasonable to expect a great story? I don't think so. Which is why when I play a game like FFX-2, which fails to deliver an even mediocre story, I'm so disappointed. I'm not sure what I'm going to play next. Fortunately I've got a week to decide, during which I'll spend some time with the GBA port of Broken Sword (which I already know has a great story). When I come back I'll decide if I feel up for more disappointment by playing Deus Ex: Invisible War, or maybe I'll go straight for pure action and check out Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance, which has been sitting on my stack for a really long time now. Then again, maybe I'll finally get the courage to play Zelda: The Wind Waker, which I've picked up several times already and always put back within minutes.

Real ugly racing.

Business Wire: It's Real, It's Ugly, It's Racing! Atari Announces 'Test Drive: Eve of Destruction' for the PlayStation 2.

Snuh?

Recently we received confirmation that the first retail samples of ATI's R420 (AGP Radeon X800) will debut April 26 as Radeon X800 Pro. NVIDIA's NV40 (GeForce 6800) officially launches April 13th, but retail availability will occur around April 26th. Notice the NV40 product to be released April 13th is GeForce 6800, not GeForceFX 6800. ATI's naming scheme for R420 has been closely guarded as well, but the open term we hear from vendors is "Radeon X800."

What seems highly unusual is the scheduled introduction of Radeon X800 XT on May 31st; only a month after Radeon X800 Pro's unveiling. Recall that Radeon 9800 and 9800 XT were launched six months apart. We can speculate ATI has either changed their marketing strategy, or the difference in performance between R420 and NV40 hastens ATI's release schedule. Further inspection of the ATI roadmaps reveals that "Non-Pro" Radeon X800s are absent. Perhaps "XT" has replaced the "Pro" Radeon series, and "Pro" thus replaced the "Non-Pro" Radeon series. Even though the initial launches of Radeon X800 will use 256MB of GDDR3, before the end of the year we also anticipate a 512MB revision. Furthermore, we will almost certainly see Radeon X800 SE with 128MB of DDR1; which will also debut with much a lower clockspeed.

GBA games you'll never play.

Aside from licensed titles, there are the "alternate version" kind of games, like Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell (which reproduces the same "style" of gameplay as its bigger brothers) and then there are lots and lots of nostalgia-type games. Some of these are better than others. I love my Atari Anniversary Advance and Phantasy Star Collections, but think the upcoming NES rereleases are shamelessly overpriced even at $20 (I'm sorry, but Ice Climber is not a $20 game, and I won't pay that much for Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda when neither has any extra features of any kind).

Having said that, I think the GBA could have some amazing classic games ported to it, although the failure (apparently a spectacular failure at that) of the Blizzard Classic Arcade line pretty much means we'll never see many of them. But just for the heck of it, I present my list of games that I'd love to see ported to GBA. The chances are slim-to-none, but I can certainly dream.

Continue reading "GBA games you'll never play."

IF Quake.

IF Quake is a port of the Quake engine to the Inform programming language. Inform being an Infocom-compatible language for creating text adventures. Anyway, the site's being slashdotted, but if you can read this, you can still check out the site (and download IF Quake, as the files been moved to FileShack).

The big, big news.

My letter to the Shacknews community lays out pretty much all the details, but as far as this site is concerned, there shouldn't be any real difference. I won't discuss anything related to my job here, but anything else is still fair game.

It's sort of a relief to be announcing this. For the last couple of days I've felt a bit guilty, as if I were hiding something from the Shack community. Anyway, go read the announcement, and if you have questions, I'll answer them here or in the comments over there.

Carmack in 3D.

An artist (who also was behind the "Fake Screenshot Contest" exhibition) has created a foam resin sculpture based on the character model in Quake III Arena modeled after engine programmer John Carmack. This is really a clever little project, as it's a sculpture based on a 650 polygon model, not the actual person. This gives the model a unique look. Here's a quick glimpse (check out the artist's site for more pictures):

The one Blizzard game I won't play.

Remember that magic you felt the first time you clicked with EverQuest?

I've played every single Blizzard game since the original WarCraft (including all the expansion packs), consider WarCraft II to be among my favorite games of all time, and I'm not looking forward to this game in the slightest.

It's not that I don't think Blizzard can make a quality MMO (if anyone can, I think it's Blizzard) but I just don't care about massively multiplayer games. They bore me to tears. I'm on Blizzard's press list, which means I'm in the beta test and will receive a review copy when the game ships...but I just don't care about this one.

Truth be told, I was looking forward to WarCraft Adventures more than I am WoW. That game never really looked very good at all, and admittedly this is only because Infocom vet Steve Meretzky was brought in to save it towards the end (sadly he failed and it was canceled).

I hate to be a bitter gaming fan, but even though I recognize that there are going to be a lot of people who love WoW and play it for many, many, many years, the fanboi in me wishes Blizzard hadn't devoted so much of their time to this project. MMOs are huge undertakings, and I'd much rather have seen a StarCraft, WarCraft or Diablo sequel instead. That's not to say that none of those won't happen, but the push to concentrate on WoW didn't help.

For the record though, I do think it's really, really, really cool that even World of WarCraft is going to be a hybrid Mac/PC release. That's really quite amazing. Even the beta is cross-platform!

It's like grouphug for gamers.

There are some really entertaining ones here. Mine is that I cheated to beat the last boss in Half-Life (the guy was so lame I just didn't have the patience) but there are lots of others, including admissions of cheating with aimbots and wallhacks with online games, people who admit to never having played Doom, Quake and/or Half-Life, and the inevitable confession from someone who lets his friends win occasionally so they won't get frustrated and stop playing.

It's highly entertaining stuff. Not quite as perverse as some of the confessions on grouphug, but still entertaining nonetheless.

Comics! Get your comics here!

This is a big experiment for me, and this is only the first of many, many, many boxes I have to dissect like this, so stay tuned for more in the months ahead.

Lightening the load.

The other thing I mention in that post is that I'm currently exploring ways to sell off portions of my comic book collection. This is true. As much as I love my comics, I have literally thousands of them that do nothing but take up space. I'd happily replace them with easier-to-manage paperbacks.

The logistics of this means it's a long term project in the extreme. Since selling the whole thing at once is impossible (it's far too large and I have no idea what books are in which box, to say nothing of their condition) I think what I'm going to do is create a series of 20 book bundles and sell them for $10 - $15 each. This means I'll have hundreds of them, but since I couldn't possibly care less about their actual value (plus I'm too lazy to look it up) many of these will wind up being huge bargains for comic collectors. Over the years many of the books I've bought purely to read have wound up being valuable. Only a couple of times have I ever had the intelligence to do anything about this, and even then, I sold them for a fraction of their real worth (example: I sold first printings of the first six issues of Bone for about $30...they're now worth a bit more than that).

If anyone has any advice for selling a collection of this size, feel free to speak up in the comments.

Yet another game to movie adaptation.

Hopefully the movie will have a better camera than the game, or else all the action will happen off-screen and walls will get in the way of important plot elements.

I'm so funny.

Oh dear god, no!

And thus, the graphic adventure genre was dealt yet another blow. That new Leisure Suit Larry game had better be freaking great.

Update: Mixnmojo has a great editorial up on the subject (plus a great headline: "LucasArts Cancels Sam & Max Freelance Police, Resigns Self to Mediocrity"). They've been slashdotted, but here's a mirror of the editorial.

Dave's not here man.

In a somewhat shocking twist, you'll actually be able to use the illegal drugs you confiscate throughout the game. In fact, they'll actually give you short-term benefits. Smoking marijuana causes the player to go into what the developers call "weed time," which is functionally identical to Max Payne's bullet time in that everything slows down, giving you more time to react to a crowd of enemies. Speed, as you might expect, makes you move quickly. Dropping acid fills the screen with crazy colors, but it also gives innocent citizens large jester heads while giving criminals large devil heads, for easy identification. Smoking crack causes the controller to vibrate as though you have a heavy, pounding heartbeat and pumps up the damage you can do. Finally, taking liquid soul turns everyone on-screen into an enemy, but it also lets you kill everyone with one hit.

Although they left out the heroin. I guess they have to leave something for the sequel.

Today's random unedited IGN screencap.

Today's random bit of Infocom nostalgia.

Of these, I have many favorites...the first three Zork games have a special place in my heart, as does The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Lurking Horror, the absolutely-brilliant (if exceedingly difficult) Suspended, heck, even Seastalker brings back great memories (that one was a birthday present from my Uncle, if I remember correctly).

I have played these games repeatedly on a pretty impressive list of platforms over the years. I discovered pretty early on that all you needed was the original data files to keep running them on different platforms, so from my Apple //C I copied them to my first-generation PowerBook (using a friend's Mac that had a 5.25" drive), from there they went to my 286, then 486, then P100, then P2 450...and so on, with occaisional side trips to my Palm Pilots over the years.

Anyway, because of all of this, and because I'm just this much of a dork, I'm proud to present Zork I: The Great Underground Empire. Complete, and playable, using Zplet, the Java-based Z-machine interpreter. Enjoy!

Continue reading "Today's random bit of Infocom nostalgia."

OMG GIRLZ PLAY GAMES

Every six months, some mainstream news outlet decides that this is a story. As far as I can tell, the "OMG GIRLS PLAY GAMES" stories are doing more harm than good.

Think of it this way: these stories aren't about how girls are a significant part of the gaming scene, they're always about those weird, exceptions to the rule: girls who play deathmatch, or games like Counter-Strike. Where's the story about the fact that the overwhelming majority of Sims players are women? Or the fact that most of the gamers playing mainstream games on sites like Pogo.com and Yahoo Games are women?

This is a tired, tired, subject. Girls play video games. Guys play video games. Quite frequently they play the same games. Get over it, people.

Somebody stop this guy. Please.

Take a look at that list. Now, I'm sure most people can guess the (ahem) four reasons why a Fear Effect movie is a good idea, and BloodRayne has that dominatrix-vampire thing going for it. But freaking Dungeon Siege? I mean come on! How on earth that could possibly be anything better than the worst kind of low-level renaissance faire drivel is unknown to me.

In an attempt to steer Mr. Boll in the right direction, I present a few suggestions for games that might make for similarly entertaining movies:

• Fantasy Zone: The story of a little spaceship nobody believed in fighting against impossible odds. And weird looking flying mushroom things. With Chris Rock as Opa Opa.
• Tetris: The story of one man's quest for revenge against the system that ruined his life. With Keanu Reeves as the detective who never gives up hope. And Lawrence Fishburn as the diabolical madman bent on world domination.
• Yar's Revenge: Evil insects from the Razak system are invading our space! It's time to fight back as only we can..with extreme force. Featuring Jim Carrey as Yar, the man who's been pushed too far.
• Breakout: A taut political thriller that follows one FBI agent (Renee Zelwegger) as she fights against the clock to prevent nuclear war. With George Clooney as the man she loves.
• Zero Wing: All your base are belong to us! When that mysterious phrase begins appearing randomly across the globe, one woman (Nicole Kidman) tries to decipher its meaning. But can she do so before time runs out while raising two kids and working part-time as a waitress? With Omar Sharif as CATS and Robin Williams as the pilot who takes off for great justice.

Today's reminder that being a Mac gamer sucks.

I ran out of the military base, with about a minute to spare on the bomb timer.

The end sequence starts to roll.

The game crashes.

Every. Time.

Reliably.

Sigh.

I've said it before...

Apparently the version 1.04 patch for Halo disables the ability to walk forward.

Being a Mac gamer sucks.

Sigh.

I'm glad I bought mine. I've been a bit disappointed with the multiplayer experience, but at least I can go on record as saying I support Mac game makers.

Here's mud(pie) in your eye.

Continue reading "Here's mud(pie) in your eye."

Make your own Prince of Persia sound efffects!

Want proof? Here's how to make your own sword sound effects in three easy steps!

1. Grab one (1) standard tablespoon and one (1) frying pan (I prefer to use the non-stick variety for easy clean-up).
2. Hold pan firmly in one hand, and bang the bottom with the spoon. Record process.
3. Put into game, unedited, as sword sound effect. Wow! Sound effects sure are easy to make!

You ever have one of those days...

I'm surprised it took so long.

Well this toads the wet sprocket...

Speaking of Halo, the 1.03 patch came out last night. I haven't given it a whirl yet, but it adds multiplayer compatibility with PC servers, so it'll be a lot more fun to play online. There do seem to be some frustrating issues involved with the upgrade however. People are complaining about not being able to join any servers after the upgrade (although deleting your preferences seems to fix that), and it looks like it breaks save games as well. Maybe I'll wait until the 1.04 patch before attempting to upgrade...

Well, I had a good run.

Thanks to a pretty large number of review copies I received during the holiday season (plus games I got as gifts), I still have a huge stack of unplayed games waiting for me. Because of this, I'm going to curtail buying anything else for a while. I'm not formally declaring it again, as I already went four months, and that's pretty good for me. But barring any other huge bargains (or the release of must-buy games like Half-Life 2, Doom 3 or Halo 2) I'm going to concentrate on the games I already have for the foreseeable future. And hey, if you don't believe me, get this: I actually passed on the chance to pick up F-Zero GX for $25. Believe me, that wasn't easy.

Yikes!

So what's the beef? Here's an image showing Russian soldiers honoring their fallen comrades from the Chechnyan conflict. And now here is an article that ran in EGM, in which the images of fallen soldiers were replaced with images of SOCOM II.

How sick is that? I mean wow...that's just in staggeringly poor taste. Who knows what they were thinking.

Just a quick note.

Review: B5: I've Found Her

I'm really not a fan of the genre, so I can't say how this ranks up against games like Descent: Freespace, Independence War or Freelancer (which has been sitting on my stack for ages now). But just in terms of getting across that B5 feel, it does an excellent job. The only thing that's been released so far is the "Prequel Campaign" which will tie-in to the eventual full campaign. Don't let the fact that it's free fool you...IFH sports full in-game cinematics, voiceover work and music, just like any retail product. And if nothing else, it's a stunning testament to the dedication of B5 fans.

The official IFH site seems to be down at the moment, but when it's back you can download it at this URL.

My letter to Christopher Byron

Update: Because this blog is under a Creative Commons license, anyone who wishes to reprint this in part or whole may do so with my permission. See here for more details.

Continue reading "My letter to Christopher Byron"

More GTA Hysteria

People, this [the violence in GTA: Vice City] is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands.

Michael Jackson is charged with seven counts of child molestation. Seven counts. Plus an additional two for using an "intoxicating agent." Mr. Byron, the author of this article, claims that the violence in GTA: Vice City is 10,000 times worse than nine counts of harm to a child? With all due respect to Mr. Byron, a single count of child molestation is far, far, far worse than anything you'll find in any video game. That he would claim otherwise is sick and reckless.

I intend to write a letter to Christopher Bryon (cbyron at nypost dot com) and suggest anyone else outraged by this pathetic excuse at financial advice do the same.

Best Fascist Dictator: Adolf Hitler.

At Shacknews, we unveiled our GOTY winners today. Unlike most places, our awards are 100% determined by our readers, which usually leads to some interesting results. We're going to be publishing the staff top ten lists later in the week (I think), and those should be interesting as well, but they won't be our formal GOTY winners. Just what each of us believes to be the ten best games they played. Having only played a handful of the winning games, my list will be radically different. And that's fine. It'll be an honest list.

Naturally, every other site is unveiling their picks as well this week. GameSpot has an okay setup for themselves: they name the nominees, and then pick a single winner in each category. There are a lot of them, but it's not too much, and they have their own dubious awards (sort of like the Warshaw Awards over at the Shack).

GameSpy on the other hand, has gone awards crazy. They give out ten awards per platform, plus genre awards, plus specific category awards, plus multiplayer awards, plus an overall GOTY award. And on top of all that, there are still reader's choice awards. Yeesh. Naturally, every single award, from Best PS2 RPG to Best GBA Remake has its own, highly reproducible image. Which is good to know for that inevitable Rock n' Roll Racing GOTY Edition.

Non peer-review awards in general don't carry a lot of merit, but if you're a third party dedicated to giving out awards, then perhaps it would be wise to exercise a bit of restraint. The reason I never take the Golden Globes seriously is because they are basically just an excuse to hand out as many awards as humanly possible to as many different people as possible. That's why they have awards for both film and television, plus separate awards for comedy and drama movies. At the Golden Globes there are always two sets of best picture, actor and actress, which means none of it means much of anything (and that's not even addressing the fact that the Hollywood Foreign Press Association is comprised of what, 30, 40 people?).

Maybe at Shacknews we should start up a set of awards for other websites. There could be the "Most Pointless Awards Award" the "Most Clearly Biased Award" (I'll happily accept that on behalf of all of my horribly biased LNC posts), the "Sleeziest Download Site Award" and of course, there would have to be the "Most Insane Advertising Campaign" award. Because we all know who would get that.

Wuss.

I kid, I kid. Honestly, Manhunt isn't that bad. I basically say this in my review of the game, but the fact is that once the shock of the gore wears off (which is pretty quickly) you're left with what is otherwise a decent stealth game.

Kill all the game developers!

"It's too little, too late," said Ringo Cayard of the Haitian American Foundation. "They made the money, the message went through."

Readers of this blog probably already know by now that I'm the first to speak up when I think there's something potentially offensive going on (the most recent example being the bizarre Chinese servant on Smallville), but this was purely a misunderstanding, and nothing more. GTA: Vice City is a work of fiction in which there are various gangs of specific ethnicities. Similar concepts have been portrayed dozens, if not hundreds of times, on television, movies and literature, and when put into the proper context, the phrase "kill all the Hatians" isn't offensive in the slightest. Rockstar could just as easily given the gangs various wacky names (like they did in Manhunt) and then the phrase would have just been "kill all the <gangnamehere>s". You could make the argument that doing so would have been a better decision, but it's a little late to blame them for not acting sooner.

Shack Holiday Guide 2003

The end is nigh.

Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated. You will adapt to service us.

Recommended Reading

"Government regulation is no big deal, they're just reinforcing industry ratings." Wrong. None of the proposed bills are based on the ESRB ratings system. In fact, it's unconstitutional for the U.S. government to regulate or enforce a private ratings system. As such, each bill aims to set its own moral barometer and establish often vague metrics for what is acceptable for everyone to purchase and play. Dancing around a state-by-state patchwork of content restrictions and peculiarities would be prohibitive not only for developers, but also for time-deprived parents and retailers (who are already working with an existing rating system).

I guess videogames cause violent behavior after all!

Anne Arundel County police say they have discovered the cause of a Friday night shooting in Edgewater: an Xbox game system.

Angry that his roommates were being too loud at 2 a.m., Robert Preston Kersey, 34, of the 1700 block of Fairhill Drive stormed into the living room and fired a single gunshot into the game system, disabling it, police said. The 9mm gunshot did not penetrate the system and did not injure anyone at the scene, police said.

Kersey has been charged with two counts of reckless endangerment and one count of destruction of property, police said.

Of course they can!

Even though Manhunt is rated M for Mature by the video game industry, teenagers can easily purchase this game. According to the most recent Federal Trade Commission secret shopper survey, 69 percent of underage teenagers were able to buy M-rated games at retail stores.

Parents need to be educated about the ratings system. Don't force retailers to do your job for you.

You can keep Halo, but I'm taking KOTOR.

Yeah, we're all killers.

Here are three points upon which the author's arguments rely:

• If a parent wanted their children to develop attitudes like Gary Ridgway, the confessed killer of at least 48 women, these games might provide a good training ground.
• These video games are not spectator activities, like going to a violent movie. They use simulation techniques that are used to teach people to fly a plane, drive a car or fight wars.
• Parents cannot trust their neighborhood stores to not sell hyper-violent video games to young children.

Taking these one at a time, there's zero proof of any kind to support the first one, the second is total conjecture, and there's only one person who claims you can learn to fire a gun by playing video games, and as for the third, video games are (as of right now) protected speech, and there is no law of any kind preventing retailers from selling an M rated game to children. You don't like violent video games? Don't buy them for your kids. And if you have an Xbox, turn on the parental controls to keep your kids from renting or borrowing them. It's really not that hard to do a small amount of research into the subject before condemning an entire industry.

Last night I made a trip to Rockstar Games (which according to some must be a hotbed of serial killer activity) where I checked out Manhunt, the next game from the GTA team at Rockstar North. You can read my impressions over at Shacknews, but the gist is that this is an extremely violent game made by adults, for adults. Unlike Postal 2, this game is actually innovative and entertaining, but the downside is that it could very easily be the next scapegoat for nutjobs like the author of the above article. But that's the chance Rockstar has to take to keep innovating in this industry. They probably could tone down the violence in their games to placate parents who would rather go after game developers than talk to their own children, but in doing so they would lose their freedom, and we gamers would suffer. Manhunt isn't for everyone, but I can't wait to jump into it head first. And I'm glad I have the freedom to do so.

When video games imitate Woody Allen gags.

There's an old joke. Uh, two elderly women are at a Catskills mountain resort, and one of 'em says: "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know, and such ... small portions."

This has been on my mind a lot lately, as it seems like the last two games I've played through have been woefully short. Not so much with Max Payne 2 (which has a fine, delicate taste to it, even if it is painfully short) but last night I finished Age of Mythology: The Titans, and it left a bad taste in my mouth.

To be clear, The Titans isn't a bad add-on by any means. But it's extremely short, the gameplay is only mildly different from the core campaign, and even at $30 it's overpriced. The Titans feels like half the game was left out to meet the holiday rush. The story never really resolves itself, and the titular Titans have a remarkably minor impact on the gameplay.

One of the cardinal rules of interesting storytelling is that you can't have everything go according to the stated plans. If the plan is to go in, kill the guards and rescue the girl, something has to go wrong. Otherwise there's no tension. The super big huge bad guy has to block the door on your way out, the main character discovers that his gun won't work, or after rescuing the girl the main character accidentally trips a bomb that's set to go off in ten seconds!! And yet, that's basically what happens in The Titans' campaign. There's no girl to be rescued (and there certainly isn't a bomb), but the plan is to raise a Titan to combat another one and then defeat the bad guy, and imagine my surprise when that's all that happens. Whee. There's never even any explanation given for Arkantos' miraculous reappearance from the beyond.

I happen to like short games in general, but this was a game that wasn't just short, it felt unfinished. If you want proof of that, yesterday afternoon I declared on Shacknews, "I'm a little disappointed at how little the Titans have affected the gameplay. In truth, I'm only about halfway through it, so I imagine their role will be beefed up significantly as I move forward". Imagine my surprise when that evening, after about an hour of gameplay, the credits started to roll.

Age of Mythology is the first "Age" game that I've ever played, so I have no idea if the add-ons for the other games were equally short. But although I may have issues with WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne, at least that offered a good 15 - 20 hours of gameplay. The Titans gave me about half that, and even then it's only because of a couple of particularly tricky missions (the subsequent ones were comparatively easy...go fig).

Oh well. Next up for me is Rockstar's Manhunt. Hopefully that'll give me at least two weeks of solid gameplay.

Jack Thompson is a horrible human being.

On June 25, one man was killed, and one woman seriously injured by two teenage boys who fired loaded rifles at a car driving through the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. It's a horrible story. The man who was slain was 45, the injured girl just 19. The lawsuit seeks to hold Rockstar Games, Take Two Interactive and Wal-Mart responsible for a sum of $246 million, as the kids supposedly got the idea for this by playing Grand Theft Auto III. I don't blame the families of the victims for bringing this suit. How could I? This was a nightmare of the worst kind, made even more so by the randomness by which the victims were chosen. No, the person to blame for this is Jack Thimpson, the attorney behind the suit, and a despicable excuse for a human being.

The fact is, that the families of the victims are in serious pain, and they're reaching out for some kind of explanation for what happened. And sadly, there is no easy explanation. Except professional sleezebag Jack Thompson swooped down and told them that there is a simple explanation, and that it's the video games these kids were playing. Now, for a moment, just think about what he's doing here. He's preying on the suffering of these people. And I have a real problem with that. Can you imagine the kind of disgusting morals a person has to have to call up victims of a horrible crime like this and tell them that there are big corporations that are to blame?

As for his claims, they are of course, completely groundless. Even if you believe that playing games is enough to give children this sort of murderous impulse, the fact remains that you can't hurt anyone with a video game. Just to prove my point, let's think about the facts again. Here we have two teenagers, who got their hands on loaded rifles. And you want to blame the video game?

Believing that the game is responsible is one thing. Pushing for legislation is extreme and groundless, but what Thompson is doing is far worse. What he's doing here is dragging these poor families through a process that will prevent them from moving on with their lives. He's done it before (like the case against id Software and others which was dropped) and he'll do it again. He even tried to pin the Washington sniper murders on Halo.

I can't say I believe in any kind of hell, but if there is one, I'll take pleasure in knowing that there's a room partitioned off for slime like him.

I guess I just suck.

Perhaps the problem is that I've been playing RTS games for so long now that I expect them to play a certain way. I have, after all, been playing them pretty much since the beginning. I have fond memories of Herzog Zwei (Genesis) and Military Madness (Turbo-Grafx), the genre's console progenitors, and while I missed Dune 2, I fell in love instantly with the original WarCraft. I pretty much have stuck fairly closely to Blizzard over the years, playing the subsequent WarCraft and StarCraft games, with occasional dalliances with other series (like Command & Conquer: Red Alert, Total Annihilation, Dune 2000, etc.).

In all of these games, I sort of developed a rhythm for each mission. Start a base, begin collecting resources, build up a really, really huge army and send it over to the other camp. That was my strategy in the original WarCraft, and it really hasn't changed very much over the years.

I suspect that this may be the reason I've had such a hard time with both The Titans and The Frozen Throne. Each varies greatly from the standard "build n' attack" formula, forcing me to come up with an entirely new approach. Still, the core WarCraft III and Age of Mythology campaigns differed as well, and I wasn't anywhere near as frustrated with those.

Perhaps these games are just getting harder. There has only been one game in the genre that I've stopped playing because of its extreme difficulty, and that was the original Homeworld. Homeworld broke my heart...I loved it so much. The graphics and audio were breathtakingly beautiful, the gameplay was tight, the story was pure brilliance...but the game was just too damn hard, and although I tried my best, and even bought the strategy guide, I just couldn't get anywhere near finishing the game. I had high hopes for the sequel, but I'm told that it's just as hard, so even though I have a review copy of the game I've been very hesitant to try it out.

AOM: The Titans certainly isn't that hard, not by a long shot, and neither was The Frozen Throne. It took me six full restarts to get past one mission in TFT, but I did it eventually. I'm sure that given enough time, I'll get past The Titans as well.

This is pretty clever.

www.iwanttoworkatea.com

I can't say I understand why he's chosen Electronic Arts out of all the companies in the industry (one can only hope he's heard the horror stories) but you have to admire the concept. Good luck, man.

So what do you think...should I start iwanttoworkatdccomics.com?

The evil that is Best Buy.

A quick read of the reports on ResellerRatings shows many people who have had their orders canceled without notification, so I'd advise caution when ordering from them. But hey, it could be worse...they could be like Dragon.ca and disappear completely (after charging people's credit cards, no less).

Yeesh.

Subject: we told you so
Date: November 3, 2003 12:37:37 PM EST

hi everyone,

One month ago we informed about Microsoft and IBM working together to develop the Xbox successor's CPU. Some of you reported the story, some did not. Today it is official. You can link back to our original story (http://www.teamxbox.com/news.php?id=4929) and of course to the new one (http://www.teamxbox.com/news.php?id=5075).

We'd like to thank The Inquirer, Worthplaying, Vodoo Extreme and Xbox-Scene for reporting the original story.

Totally unfunny article by David Cross.

Angel vs. Kain

As I am playing through the original Blood Omen (which really hasn't held up all that well), I find myself thinking a lot about the world of the Legacy of Kain titles and their surrounding mythology. While the Blood Omen games aren't the greatest games ever made, they have helped to develop (along with the two Soul Reavers) this character that is among the very best videogame villains ever created. As I've stated before, I love playing as the bad guy, and the Blood Omen games allow me to indulge my dark side. But Kain is much more than just another evil vampire. He's amoral to the extreme...a ruthless tyrant and hideous monster, capable of destroying all who come into contact with him. In other words, he's the perfect anti-hero for an action game.

I think it's time that Kain branched out beyond video games. With the Legacy of Kain games, enough of a mythology has been developed that there's enough material here for at least one movie, and more likely two or three. Sadly, after the last Tomb Raider film fizzled I doubt anyone's going to be willing to take a chance with a different Eidos property. Still, I'd love to see a high-quality ongoing Legacy of Kain comic series. There's already been a one-shot Soul Reaver book, and an adaptation of Defiance is on the way, but that's attempting to carry over an interactive story into a linear medium, which is never ideal. A comic set in the world of Nosgoth that wasn't tied to an existing storyline would be all kinds of fun.

But for the time being, I'm content to wait for Legacy of Kain: Defiance. And when I say that, I mean really wait, since my pledge means I won't be buying it until next year. But that's okay. I've never played the first Soul Reaver, and that's waiting to keep me company until then anyway (even if it is told from Raziel's point of view).

Return of the king.

After years of nothing, or generally mediocre Myst clones, it would appear that the adventure genre is starting back up again. LucasArts may have disappointed fans when they canned their Full Throttle sequel, but having seen a bit of it at E3, I'm glad they did. I'd much rather have no sequel at all, than one that failed to live up to the promise of the original. Much more exciting is LucasArts' new Sam & Max game, which, let's face it, could very well be the Greatest Game Ever Made. Okay, not really. But I have high hopes for it anyway.

Now all I need is to hear that a new Space Quest game is in development, along with new Maniac Mansion, Monkey Island and Grim Fandango sequels. The chances of all of those happening? They're so astronomical it would be painfully depressing for me to even mention it. So while I'm at it, I might as well throw new Manhunter: New York and Lurking Horror games on the pile (+2 geek points if you remember either of those).

Gaming Magazines Revisited

Continue reading "Gaming Magazines Revisited"

As God is my witness...

Okay, not really. But as we inch closer to the holiday shopping season, traditionally the busiest for the gaming industry, I find myself not particularly enthusiastic about any upcoming releases, save for a few random big-name titles.

Because of this, and the overwhelming size of my "to be played" stack, I have decided not to buy another game until 1/1/04 at the earliest. Seriously. No, really! I'm serious! I realize that me making a statement like this is about as plausible as Homer Simpson's hunger strike, but nonetheless, I hereby swear that I will sit on the sidelines this holiday season.

Continue reading "As God is my witness..."

Atomic Supermonkeys Master Mind Control

The real story is that scientists have successfully gotten a monkey to control a prosthetic arm using impulses from the brain. This landmark study could someday allow for those suffering from paralysis to move damaged limbs without the need for prosthetic devices.

I've been fascinated by stories like this for years, ever since I first got my hands (or brain, for that matter) on the failed gaming device known as The Mind Drive. This was a cheap looking plastic device that plugged into a computer's serial port (which was the cause of many, many problems back in the day) and could be used to control specially-written games using impulses from your brain.

Basically you put your index finger on the thing and thought about moving to the left or right, and poof! The cursor would move. There were only a handful of games released for it, and I only used two, one of which was a bowling game, the other was a downhill skiing title, and neither worked particularly well. But it was a really cool piece of technology.

This wasn't the first attempt at using brainwaves in games. Sega and Atari both toyed with the idea, and long after the demise of the Mind Drive, I had a conversation with someone at Logitech, who apparently bought the technology when the original company folded. Apparently Logitech tried to make something worthwhile out of the tech but just couldn't get it to be reliable enough.

That's a shame, because I thought the technology showed a lot of promise for handicapped people or for those whose carpal tunnel has gotten so bad that they cannot use a regular mouse (or even trackball) anymore. But it wasn't particularly reliable, and while I did succeed in getting the clunky mouse drivers to work in Windows 3.1, it never worked very well (then again, maybe my mind wasn't disciplined enough for it). Maybe this newer technology will lead to a similar, but more reliable device being made, because I think there's a real need out there for something like this.

OMG TEH SHACK IS BROKEN!!!!

Update: It's live!

Review: Snatcher for Sega CD

Continue reading "Review: Snatcher for Sega CD"

Valve's world of suck.

What compounds this problem is that Valve up until now has done an admirable job at keeping everything about Half-Life 2 completely under wraps. They didn't even announce the game until E3 back in May, and the game has been in development for several years! Already screenshots are starting to pop up online showing parts of the game that Valve hasn't demonstrated publicly...and that's just got to be horrible for a company that had intended gamers to get a totally new experience the first time they fired up the game.

I hope the game isn't delayed until April...I'm in no rush to upgrade my video card (which is sadly necessary for HL2) but I'd hate to see some annoying hacker (or hackers, as this was a pretty hefty operation) ruin the holiday season for so many gamers.

I'd buy that for a dollar!

All of that seems to at long last be changing. About a year and a half ago, Infogrames (now rebranded as Atari) released Atari Anniversary Advance, which is one of the very best collections to ever hit the GameBoy Advance. For under $20 (and if you look around, you should be able to find it for half that now) you got six absolute classics: Asteroids, Centipede, Battlezone, Missle Command, Super Breakout, and topping the whole collection off is the brilliant Tempest. The collection's not perfect (high scores aren't saved, which kind of sucks), but it's pretty close.

It looks like two other companies are starting to get the same idea. Later this year, Aspyr (previously a Mac-only publisher) will release Activision Anthology, a collection of pretty much every single game released by Activision for the Atari 2600 (that's well over 50 games, and includes some that have never been released before), plus 7 "homebrew" titles created by fans. Activision really only had a couple of real classics, but the rest were solid, and for $30, it's a great bargain, and it'll be released for GBA, PC and Mac.

But the best collection I've ever heard of is coming from Midway, who seem to have finally realized just how good their back catalog of games really is. Next month they'll be unleashing Midway Arcade Treasures for GameCube, PS2 and Xbox, and this thing absolutely looks amazing. Included here are 20 great games, including Defender (and its sequel), Joust, Spy Hunter, Gauntlet, Rampage, Rampart, Sinistar, Klax and the two kings of the collection: Robotron and Smash TV. Plus, because these will be released for home consoles only, there's lots of bonus DVD material here, including interviews with the original developers and historical data. I for one can't wait to play Robotron and Smash TV (which both used dual sticks in the arcade) perfectly emulated on a DualShock.

I really hope more companies start to do this. There are lots and lots of great games that deserve being emulated and packaged up like this. I'd love to see a LucasArts SCUMM collection for GBA (mm...handheld Maniac Mansion) or some of those great old Sierra adventure games collected and re-released.

Review: Ys Book I & II

Continue reading "Review: Ys Book I & II"

Today's bit of bizarre youthful rebellion.

Why on earth anyone would want to splash this word across the door of a place of worship is beyond me, but it's worth mentioning that the system just celebrated its 20th anniversary (complete with a particularly ghastly commemorative GBA SP) in Japan.

As with so many things, thanks are due to FARK for the tip.

RealPC == vaporware.

Life can be so cruel.

*sigh*

A rare loonygames update.

Fortunately one thing that hasn't changed: Duke Nukem Forever, which was the subject of loonygames' first cover story, still isn't out. Thank god some things are still the same.

Another Dragon.ca Update

A shame that so many people had to be screwed by the pompous, harrassing owner. As a former employee, let me tell you how horrible an experience it was! Once I found out all of the illegal activities of Dragon's business, I tried to change things, both for the staff that was told on a daily basis how stupid they were and for the customers that were being screwed out of their $$. When it became apparent that I couldn't change the illegal operations, I did assist in getting some people's money back to them before I left.

Trust me, it was hell on earth to be employed there. The company moved to Orangeville in June '01 and operated out of a warehouse there. I have recently been told by sources that Sanjay Mehta is now operating an illegal DirecTV hu card operation in Canada out of his girlfriend's basement. Buyers beware. Not only is owning a DirecTV satellite system in Canada illegal, these hu cards screw legitimate DirecTV owners out of their signal.

When I can find out more detailed information about the sites (yes, there is more than one) he is operating, I will post them here. Stay posted...

Decisions, decisions.

GameCube: Best bonus character (Link from The Legend of Zelda), decent visual & audio quality, worst controller.

PlayStation 2: Ho hum bonus character (Heihatchi from Tekken), decent visual & audio quality, best controller.

Xbox: Decent bonus character (comic book character Spawn -- not my bag, but some people dig it), best visual & audio quality, passable controller (assuming it's the S model, and not the original).

It's a hard decision indeed. I cast my lot this weekend, and went with the GameCube one, despite my general dislike of the GameCube controller.

Why GameCube? I racked my brain over the weekend over this, and eventually landed on this one because of two primary reasons: first, Link really is a cool bonus character, and even if all of the bonus characters aren't a huge part of the game, I'm much more excited to see Link than Spawn in a fighting game. Secondly, I was able to play all three versions of the game at E3, and the Xbox version looked significantly better than the other two -- but only because it was being shown on an HDTV. Since I don't actually own an HDTV, I ruled that out, and while the Xbox version boasts Dolby 5.1 over the GameCube's Dolby Pro Logic II (an inferior, but still solid analog format) I decided that since this is a fighting game, the extra audio fidelity wouldn't be that noticeable.

There were two other minor reasons...for one thing, despite owning a GameCube for ages now, I haven't had any particularly good reason to get a second controller. Since there are some other decent GameCube multiplayer games on the way (including F-Zero GX and the new Mario Kart) this seemed like a good idea. But there's also the larger issue of the fact that my GameCube doesn't get a whole lot of use lately. Oh sure, I use it for the Game Boy Player, and I'm long overdue to crack in to Zelda: The Wind Waker (which I'm planning on doing as soon as I polish off WarCraft III: The Frozen Throne) but I think it'll be nice to have a decent fighting game for my GameCube, since I've already got ones for my other systems. (For PSX I've got the sublime Street Fighter Alpha 2, and for Xbox I've got Capcom vs. SNK 2).

As for the larger issue of the GameCube controller, I figure if it turns out to be a serious problem, I'll just pick up one of those $10 PS2-to-GameCube adapters. But I don't think I'll need it. At E3 I was able to pick it up and get right into it.

What's in a name?

The worst offender in recent memory is Giants: Citizen Kabuto. What the hell does that name mean? I mean really? From that title you would think the game centers exclusively on really big creatures, and tells the story of one such creature who aspired to greatness in the publishing industry before succumbing to his own indulgence and dying alone, mourning the loss of his childhood.

But you would be wrong.

Giants: Citizen Kabuto actually is about a clever and original world, which is inhabited by various creatures, including giants, but also funny little big headed guys, sea creatures, and some rather silly british blokes who crash landed there. In actuality, the game doesn't even center on Kabuto, as his campaign makes up only a third of the game, if that. For the rest of the game, you'll be controlling the brits and a female sea creature (who discovered her own shame just months before its release and shipped fully clothed).

The name "Giants: Citizen Kabuto" is bizarre, and admittedly it is a bizarre game, but it's just terribly misleading. Of course, this is from a developer who named themselves Planet Moon, so what would you expect? Their next game is just as confusingly titled. The name "Armed and Dangerous" suggests a kind of rugged, SpecOps type adventure. But no! The game, like Giants, has the same kind of goofy humor the developer is known for. At least this time they can claim the title is ironic, but it's still silly.

Other recent offending games: Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne (wait, didn't he fall in the first game? How much more can he fall? And this is supposed to be a love story?), PlanetSide (what does that even mean, anyway?) and EverQuest Online Adventures (apparently console gamers need to be told in the title whether a game is online or not, a la Phantasy Star Online). A couple of other slightly offensive titles include Battlefield 1942 (which doesn't take place exclusively in 1942, so why bother putting a year in the title?) and Medieval: Total War (Total Medieval War would make more sense, wouldn't it?). And those are just a few of the ones on my "to be played" stack.

Obviously, the name of the game isn't as the gameplay, but Giants was actually a really fun game that didn't sell nearly as well as it should have, and you have to wonder if the game would have sold better under a different (more accurate) title.

Core gets bitchslapped.

I have a strange fascination with the Tomb Raider series. Although I haven't played one since Tomb Raider III, I haven't forgotten how good (and I mean really good) the original game was. I seem to be in the minority there, as most hardcore gamers tend to be very bitter on the subject of Tomb Raider, choosing to remember only the crappiness that came later in the series, instead of the groundbreaking first title.

For those who may have forgotten, Tomb Raider was one of the very first games to utilize a third person 3D camera. The only other game to do so was Mario 64, and while both games had camera problems, neither was so bad as to make the game unplayable. Tomb Raider showed off a completely 3D world in a way nobody had seen before. And the first time I saw the dinosaur in that game I was in total awe. Tomb Raider was also one of the first games to offer 3D acceleration when paired with a 3dfx Voodoo card, and I remember those first rendered screenshots and being absolutely blown away by what I was sure had to be pre-rendered.

But nonetheless, the franchise has faltered. The second game wasn't bad, but by the third it was in desperate need of reinvention. Instead of giving us that, we had drivel like The Last Revelation and Chronicles shoved down our throats, and while the early details about The Angel of Darkness sounded intriguing (remember when it was going to be an episodic game?) the end result was more of the same, and more of the same that came late and was totally bug-ridden.

I think there's still time to save the Tomb Raider franchise, although not as much as Eidos would probably like. It's going to take a really good game to bring the series back, and hopefully Crystal Dynamics can do that. What's still unknown is if there's any time left to save Core Design, as their non-Tomb Raider games haven't sold very well.

More polygons, less cleavage.

New hardware. Grr!

While I briefly considered getting a Pentium 4, the price difference between a decent P4 and a decent Athlon XP "Barton" is still upwards of $100, so I went with an XP 2700+. I splurged on the motherboard, and ordered a DFI LAN Party (the nForce2 model). I chose that one because it's totally tricked out, with on board networking (two network jacks, actually), decent audio, Serial ATA (not that I'm going to use it any time soon, of course), nice rounded cables and a sweet front panel. That, and the fact that it's awful purty (and surprisingly affordable).

Because my current game machine's case is falling apart (and it has a power supply that can't handle a high-end video card), I'm replacing that as well. I ordered a pretty straightforward Antec case that comes with a pre-installed 400w power supply. It's actually the same one I have for my server, although my server has about five more fans than this one's going to have. The rest of the hardware (the DVD-ROM, memory, hard drive etc.) I'm going to move over, since they work fine, with no real problems.

As for the video card, I do plan on upgrading that, as I don't have a card that can handle Doom 3 or Half-Life 2, and I'm going to need one come September. But the good news is that by upgrading the case, CPU and motherboard, I'm actually spending several hundred dollars less than I would have had I just bought a new video card. I can hang on to that money, and when ATI announces their new card (which is expected like any day now) I should have enough left to pick up the current 9800 Pro after price drops. And naturally I'm going to keep selling stuff, so who knows...I might even have enough for that post-9800 card.

Previously whenever I bought stuff like this I just went with whatever's cheapest on PriceWatch (a practice that resulted in a couple of bad experiences), but this time around I ordered all of this from NewEgg.com, which I've used once before and was quite happy with, and seems to be what everyone here at my office uses as well. They have decent service and solid prices, and with any luck my equipment will arrive in fine shape.

There's no denying that playing PC games is an expensive hobby. Once I've rebuilt my machine I'm looking forward to firing up Morrowind just to see if I can turn up all the graphics options...I'm willing to bet that if I do I'll still get a really choppy framerate. Now, if I ever put in a seriously high-end video card, that will be a different story. Then again...there's always some more powerful hardware out there...I'm sure that's when I'll discover that to really take advantage of the game, an Athlon 3000+ is needed.

Everything must go!

My goal in all of this is to raise enough cash to buy a new, super high end video card. Those things are damn expensive, and as it currently stands, I'm looking at 5 FPS in Doom 3 or Half-Life 2. Tops. If I'm lucky. Now, if I manage to sell everything on the list...well, then I might just be able to justify a serious overhaul of my gaming machine...I'd love to replace that aging case and move up to an Athlon XP 3000+. But that's a big "if." For now, I'll be perfectly happy with a 256 MB video card.

96 pages of crap.

The thing that's always sucked about these magazines is that they're filled with non-content. "Previews" that are totally pandering (even for game previews), news that's long out of date by the time the magazine ships, and lots and lots of dull screenshots with very little text to go alongside them. I guess if I didn't have an internet connection I'd be interested in these images, but since I do, and have already seen 99% of those shots, I just skipped right by them. And sadly, there's not a whole lot else in that magazine beyond that stuff.

It didn't always used to be that way, mind you. I have many fond memories of Next-Generation, which not only provided thoughtful, insightful articles, but also well-written interviews, previews and reviews, and even the occasional news scoop. Sadly, those days are long gone. Even the best of the current gaming magazines (that'd be PC Gamer) is mostly screenshots and old news. But at least that mag has decent editorials and reviews. Game Informer seems to be lacking on all fronts.

In other countries, the situation isn't nearly as grim. In Japan, the weekly gaming mags like Famitsu not only have huge numbers, but are the primary source for Japanese gaming news (and that includes in this country, since the larger sites employ people to scan the Japanese mags for news every week). And of course the UK is home to Edge, the last great English language magazine. For years I've been toying with the idea of getting an imported subscription to Edge, although at nearly $100 it's an expensive idea.

Part of me hopes that someday we'll get another really good gaming magazine in this country. Despite not being all that interested in overly technical aspects of game design, I used to read Game Developer, and that magazine is a step in the right direction. What we need is a good mass market gaming magazine in this country. And as soon as someone steps up to make it, I'll be first in line to buy a copy (or beg for a job, whichever comes first).

Huh?

The sequel to everyone's favorite Xbox game emerges at last and proves to live up to every hope fans had for it. Journalists were seen with their mouths open, agog at the gorgeous visuals and consequently apoplectic in their praise as they felt the need to communicate how incredible it looked to anyone that would listen.

Don't get me wrong, I think Halo 2 is going to be a good game, and it looked decent, but I was totally unimpressed by the demo I saw. That's why I named Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic as Shacknews' best Xbox game at E3. I don't doubt that the critics on the jury were impressed by the game, but what surprises me is the extremeness of the write up they gave it. While their write up for Half-Life 2 is similarly gushing, that game really did leave everyone with their jaws on the floor. Halo 2 just blew away the fanboys, who would have been agog at a mission pack, let alone an actual sequel.

Everybody booze up and riot! (Virtually)

Heck, why not pass some time by running up to a random passer-by, pulling out a baseball bat, whomping them over the head a few times, kicking the body until it's done twitching, grabbing their cash, waiting around a corner for an ambulance to show up, and then throwing the driver out of the ambulance and driving off, running over a pedestrian or two for good measure. In the game, that is. In the game.

After all, it's our constitutional right to be virtual psychopaths! So spread some virtual mayhem.

Hooray for gamers!

The article goes on to say that in a study, people who played Medal of Honor for 10 days scored better on visual perception tests than those who played Tetris for 10 days. If you ask me, forcing someone to play Tetris for 10 days in a row is nothing short of insane. At least Medal of Honor offers huge amounts of variety. I mean, I love Tetris and all, but 10 days? Good lord, I'd go nuts.

And there was much rejoicing.

For what it's worth, Epic's Cliff Bleszinksi told me at E3 that the real hurdle in getting UT2k3 ported to OS X was actually the OS itself, and that it should be much easier to get the next one out. We'll see. In the mean time, Mac gamers can look forward to a few months before their shiny new game becomes obsolete.

The Return of Atari

Sadly, this is purely a cosmetic change. By adopting the Atari name, Infogrames instantly gets serious street cred with the techno set, not to mention the coolest logo in the industry. But that's all they get. This does not mean we'll see Atari re-entering the home console or arcade markets. Info-er, I mean Atari, doesn't even own the rights to the Atari Games arcade business, Midway does.

It's cool to see the Atari brand name being out in the front of things again, but I do wish there were a bit more substance to back it up. Still, I must admit I'm looking forward to getting some cool Atari swag at E3 next week.

It's a bird, it's a plane! It's pixelated!

So the question arises...will these games suck like every other one to date? I mean, has there ever been a sorrier lot of games than the Superman collection? You know something's seriously wrong when the best game of the lot was a totally lame sidescrolling arcade game from Taito, whose only real claim to fame was that it featured John Williams' score (albeit totally MIDIfied), and actually played more like Altered Beast than a Superman game.

Now mind you, these games didn't have to suck, it's purely the fault of the developers. I don't think we'll ever know what the hell Titus was thinking with Superman 64, particularly the absolutely insane and nonsensical multiplayer mode that (I kid you not here) had you flying around in spaceships for some reason. And don't even get me started on the 2600 Superman game. You know a game's bad when the best I can say about it is that it's not as bad as the disastrous E.T. game. I had very high expectations for this most recent batch of games, but after those less-than-stellar reviews I pretty much lost hope.

So I wish EA luck with their new titles. If they're smart they'll avoid oddities like flying saucers and try and make a decent Superman game for once. If they do, I'll be first in line to buy one. Heck, I'll probably be first in line either way. I'm a total sucker for this crap.

Bargain Bin Browsing

So I went bargain bin browsing last night. Since I'm moving this weekend (and still quite addicted to HOMM IV), I didn't pick anything up, but I did see a few notable items there. Glancing through the bargain area, I spotted Majesty for a mere $9.99. Actually, it was Majesty Gold, which includes both the original game and its add-on pack. I was just thinking about this game, thanks to the pretty impressive teaser image for the sequel that was released this week. I think I'm going to pick this one up pretty soon. At that price it's a steal.

I also looked at a few other games I've been waiting to hit the sweet spot price wise...Dungeon Siege has dipped below $30, although I think I'll wait for it to slide a bit more before picking that up...Stronghold has gotten pretty reasonably priced, as has Stronghold Crusader, its standalone expansion. I'm very curious about these two, but I'm not sure which one to pick up. I've heard Crusader is the better of the two, but at the same time I'm not sure if that's the one I want to start with. GoGamer sells the Stronghold Deluxe Edition, which includes both games for around $30, so that might be the way to go there. I'm also keeping a close eye on Medieval: Total War, as I really liked Shogun: Total War before it. But that one I think I'll wait a while longer on, until I can pick it up for really cheap.

But all of this is unecessary at the moment, of course, as I'm still playing HOMM, and I've got .hack for me when I'm ready to move on.

PC to Mac to PC

Blizzard took the lead by releasing WarCraft III as a hybrid Mac and PC disc from day one, but that's really very rare. As much as I'd love to see that happen more often, I'm not going to hold my breath. What I would like to see more of, is what id's done for years, and that's to make the only native portion of the game the actual executable file, allowing you to download the playable demo and use the files off your PC disc to get the full game on a Mac (or Linux box, for that matter). This can be done with any Quake game, and some of the third party Quake engine titles as well.

There are two games I can see myself wanting to do this with: Unreal Tournament 2003 and HOMM IV. In both cases I already own the PC version, but would like to use 'em on my Mac, and don't feel like going out and buying them all over again. Of the two, I'm much more likely to buy UT2k3 again, since I miss being able to jump into a quick game on my server and then get back to work without having to get up and walk across the room (not to mention the fun of multitasking!). I mention this now, as I face the prospect of having to pack up my computers for the move, and am trying to avoid doing this, as I'm still desperately addicted to HOMMIV. While I do have Heroes III Complete for Mac, I'm enjoying the storyline of part IV, and don't want to regress until I've seen this thing to its conclusion.

All of this would be moot, if Virtual PC were able to run games, but sadly it can't (believe me, I've tried). My iBook doesn't do VPC so well, but my desktop does it perfectly, and it made a world of difference for me during my recent switch from a PC to a Mac desktop. There is some hope on this front, as RealPC is back from the dead, and claims to be able to run games. Apparently they signed a non-compete agreement with Connectix, which became null and void when Microsoft acquired Virtual PC. So we'll see. In an ideal world I could effortlessly glide from one OS to another, taking my games with me as I did it. It probably won't happen, but that doesn't mean I can't hope for the best.

Things that make you go HOMM...

This isn't the first time I've played the game. When I first picked it up many months ago, I played it a bit and put it aside while I launched myself into something else. And I'm sure after finishing this campaign, I'll put it aside again. What I love about this game, is just how much bang you get for your buck. I mean, there are six whole campaigns here! And that's not counting the two expansion packs that are available.

I love the HOMM series, and have since the very first one. But sometimes it seems like there's just too much gameplay in the box. A single map can take as much as a week to pass, and that's only one area of an entire campaign. All told, 3DO estimates there's 140 hours of gameplay out of the box. And again, there are two expansion packs available (for very little cash, to boot). You have to wonder if 3DO might sell more copies of their expansion packs if they made the game a little shorter. At this rate, it will probably be a year before I've finished the core game and am ready for more. Then again, I may decide that after completing the game I want to go back and play the older missions with a harder skill level.

The HOMM series isn't for everyone. Heck, it's probably not even for most people. More than any other series in gaming (save for Derek Smart's' Battlecruiser 3000 AD, which will never change for anyone, anywhere, any time) this series hasn't changed much since its inception. Yes, there are changes, and they're good ones, but this is one of those games that requires you to read the manual while you take the tutorial, has more text than FMV to push the story forward, and is still very much 2D. And I love that. But all the same, I hope the next one makes a few steps forward, and (*gasp*) even tries out a true 3D engine. If WarCraft could do it, so can HOMM.

It's official: Dragon.ca Dead

I base this on a handful of stories I heard from other people who were left hanging by the company (some of whom have been screwed out of money -- I got lucky there) as well as the total unresponsiveness from their web site (which has officially shut down), and finally this forum post at Gone Gold, where a former supplier reports that Sanjay Mehta, the founder of the company, "took the money and ran."

As I said, I'm lucky in that I wasn't screwed out of money by this, but I know there are people who were. If you, or someone you know is out of money, do yourself a favor and contact your bank or credit card company now while you still stand a chance to get that back.

Great Games You Probably Missed #1

Adapted from the popular fantasy series by Robert Jordan, WoT was one of the first Unreal-engine titles, and so when it first came out it wasn't without its technical difficulties. Fortunately those were fixed reasonably quickly, so if you pick this up be sure to snag the latest patch to fix all of those.

WoT is a weird game, no doubt about it. Given its rich, fantasy license, everyone was expecting this to be a full-fledged RPG, and if I recall correctly, at one point it did have some RPG elements. But by the time it was released, the game was pretty much a stock first person shooter, albeit with some unique elements, and it's those elements that makes this worth a trip to your local bargain bin.

For one thing, this is a fully fleshed out world, and it shows. If you're familiar with the books, you'll recognize the locations pretty easily, and some things (like The Ways) are downright perfect in their representation. While the AI isn't spectacular, it was decent at the time, and remains solid enough. As this is adapted from the novels, rather than have standard weapons, Wheel of Time uses a unique spells system, which can be a bit tricky at first, but is quite versatile once you get the hang of it.

The single player mode is solid, giving you a good 15 hours or so of gameplay (note that I'm saying this from memory -- I haven't played the game from start to finish in several years), and there's an excellent multiplayer component as well, although as so much time has passed since th game's release, you'd be hard pressed to find an active game online, but it's worth pulling out at your next LAN party.

When the game first came out, people didn't quite know what to think of it, and I think that's the primary reason it's so hard to find anyone who played this game as much as I did. Wheel of Time isn't going to give Half-Life a run for its money, but since it can be found for $10 or less these days, it's a great bargain. If you're curious, 3D Gamers still has the WoT demo available, so give it a whirl.

Ah, nuts.

On a much happier note, I've been working since the weekend on getting the loonygames archives back up and running at full speed. The static pages are all there, of course, they have been since I moved everything to POEHosting not too long ago. But the includes have been all kinds of wonky, breaking a lot of the intrasite navigation. The search engine's been dead for a year now, but rather than bother installing ht://Dig all over again, I'll probably just use a local Google search. I'll also be replacing the old broken UGO ads with internal looniverse ones, linking to this site, as well as the various other ones hosted by me.

The thought crosses my mind every now and then about actually bringing the site back, but it fades pretty quickly when I try and wrap my head around the enormity of such a proposition. The economics of the Internet have changed so much, that I really can't ask people to give me the kind of time needed to run loonygames again without any compensation, and I certainly can't devote that sort of time to it myself. I'm sure I'll bring it back in some way eventually, even if it's only as a place where I publish the occasional editorial, but for now at least, that job is being suitably filled by Shacknews. I would like to update the front page with a more recent status update on everyone, so maybe I'll do that once everything's working again. Besides...I can't help but chuckle when I think that Duke Nukem Forever still isn't out, despite being the subject of one of the first cover stories we ever ran.

A little Dragon(.ca) hunting.

I've ordered games from Dragon.ca before, and while they never arrived very quickly, I chalked that up to the fact that they were being shipped from the far off land of Canada (okay, so it's a stretch, but bare with me here). So I placed my order. That was about a month ago.

Now as anyone who does this on a regular basis will tell you, the reason you pre-order something is so that when the item comes out you can sit back and relax, knowing that yours will be among the first to be shipped out and you'll receive it shortly after retailers do. And yet...Capcom vs. SNK 2 has been out for weeks now, and I haven't heard squat out of Dragon.ca.

So I decided to send them a nice letter, asking what was up with my order and when it would ship. I sent this in response to my original e-mailed invoice. And it was bounced.

Dragon.ca a few weeks back had a gala blow-out sale, where everything was 50% off. This brought their servers to a crawl, and as soon as it was over the site effectively shut down, directing all requests to this page. But, thinking myself very clever, I used Google's cached version of their contact page to get a different address. It's not listed there, but they use a standard mailto CGI script, and so if you look in the source code you'll find this e-mail address. So I sent it to there.

And it was bounced.

By this point, I was getting a little annoyed, so I did a whois to get some more contact information. I pulled that up and called the number listed there, only to find out that they are no longer at that number. I did some hunting around and discovered that I'm not the only one wondering what's going on here.

My latest attempt is to send several e-mails to the e-mail addresses listed in their whois information, as well as one to what I believe is their host. I'm not the kind of person to give up on something like this by any means. If I have to start hounding their host, backbone, and the Better Business Bureau. Actually, I think I'll go ahead and file a complaint with the BBB anyway, just because they pissed me off.

I do a lot of buying online, and even with purchases through eBay I've never had anything this bad. My complaint isn't even that my order hasn't arrived yet, it's just that I don't have any way of knowing if it ever will. At this point I can walk a few blocks from my office and pick it up in person, so the sooner I can cancel this order the sooner I can get on with my online shoryuken.

Update: For those just coming in now from Google, there is a follow-up to this story here.

Long live the RTS!

Their reasoning is sound: while other genres have flourished, or evolved in various directions, the core gameplay of RTS games hasn't changed very much at all. And while there have been a few notable additions in some games, it does still come down to the same old strategy of collecting resources, building a huge army, and then unleashing it against your opponent. It's been this way since Dune 2.

I don't agree. I think there's a lot of life in this genre, as games like Age of Mythology and WarCraft III both show. While they aren't a whole lot different from games that came before, both games have evolved substantially over their earlier counterparts. And when it comes to single player campaigns, the difference is enormous.

As recently as a few years ago, it was commonplace for RTS campaigns to offer you a single short story, told from two or more points of view. This was great for WarCraft II, but it grew pretty stale over time. Age of Mythology and WarCraft III (and presumably C&C: Generals, although I haven't tried that yet) show a new level of storytelling for the genre, in which each successive campaign builds on the same story. The perspective switches of course, but characters and storyline move from location to location. The result is an RTS that has as satisfying a story as most action games (better than some) and this may eventually move up to full RPG level. And the individual missions have gotten much, much better. Some of the more creative ones in both of these games require some real thinking, and resource collection takes a back seat to actual strategy.

I look at the evolution of the RTS as being the antithesis of the survival horror genre. There's a group of games that despite several notable recent attempts (Eternal Darkness and Resident Evil 0 spring to mind) is still totally reliant on clunky controls and frustrating camera positioning. Which is a shame, because this was at one point a genre with a lot of promise.

So I heartily disagree with any RTS nay-sayers out there. Where you see yet another resource-fest, I see an evolving genre, which is striving ever closer to greatness.