GameSpite: Issue 4

31 January 08 | 13:05

Hey, look! GameSpite's monthly now. This is, uh, I guess the January issue, then. I was going to post it tomorrow but we're done already, so, hey. January. This issue is only slightly about video games -- the original theme was supposed to be comics and manga. But that slowly mutated over the course of the issue's development, and I kind of think it would be best to focus mainly on games (given the name of the site), so! Consider this an experiment. And enjoy.

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Assassin's Creed
This began life as a blog post, and it kind of shows! But since we don't put numbers on scores around here, or in fact have any sort of review standard or format whatsoever, what does it matter? It doesn't, see. So here you go: repurposed content.

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Batman Begins
Speaking of having no set format whatsoever, Kolbe's review of Batman Begins is mostly a history of the Batman franchise and all the horrible things that have happened through the years to the world's greatest detective. Which of course is crucial to understanding why Begins is so beloved by, well, anyone who has ever seen rubber Bat-nipples.

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Hate
Meanwhile, Bobservo heads to the other end of the popularity spectrum to provide the indie cred no amount of Batman articles ever could with his look at Peter Bagge's cynically humorous Hate. Well, I gather that it's cynically humorous, having never read it myself. But now I would like to.

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Little Samson
Ilchymis makes his GameSpite debut with a retrospective on one of those late-era NES games that no one ever played because we were all spoiled by Blast Processing and Mode 7: Little Samson. Cute, squatty sprites abound.

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Mega Man 5
Cute, squatty sprites also abound in Mega Man 5, but this is one of those NES games that all too many people have played, and undeservingly so if wumpwoast's review is to be believed. If Mega Man 4 was questionable in places, 5 was where it flew off the rails. I remember renting this back in the day and being terribly sad about a great series' fall. How little things have changed.

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Mushishi
Kirin contributes a two-part look at the Mushishi manga: a general overview of the series, and a field guide to spotting the titular Mushi. You know, in case you're ever out wandering in the woods of Japan and find yourself besieged by mysterious spirit creatures.

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NBA Story (Vol. 5)
Lumber Baron critiques a mid-series volume of NBA Story. Isolating book five might seem a random choice, but really, is it any more random than the series itself -- a Japanese manga chronicling real-life stories drawn from the actual NBA? I say "no."

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Uzumaki
Finally, our latest issue ends on a gruesome note with horror manga connoisseur Nich sharing the gory details about Junji Ito's Uzumaki. It's really true: the spiraling shape will make you go insane.

posted by: | category: comic, film, games, gamespite, manga, media | forums | fifteen comments | §

-3 in '07

29 January 08 | 11:20

It is quite a relief to be done with that "my favorite seven games of 2007" endeavor, since as with everything I do I bit off more than I could comfortably chew and committed myself to something that probably should have been done much more concisely.

(For those who missed them somehow, here are the links from seven to one: Odin Sphere, Halo 3, Super Mario Galaxy, BioShock, Mass Effect, Etrian Odyssey and Crackdown. Oh, and the games that didn't quite make the list for whatever reason.)

It was an interesting project regardless, simply because of the reactions it prompted: people telling me off for stressing that it was a list of my favorite games of the year rather than the "best." People telling me off for liking different games than they did -- I even received a lengthy and rather heated screed by email talking about how disappointing it was to see that I enjoyed Crackdown more than Earth Defense Force 2017. And, of course, the bizarre attempts to marginalize my personal opinions through strawman arguments and bizarre generalizations.

Ultimately all of this simply adds up to mean "people get angry when you have an opinion on the Internet," even when you take pains to state that, yes, it's just one person's opinion. Which we already knew. I guess I just haven't had enough verbal abuse, though, because it occurred to me that maybe it would be good to leaven the sweetness of my seven-part love sonnet to 2007 with a quick glance at the things that disappointed me most last year.

3. Games rushed for the holidays



Yeah, the image there is from Assassin's Creed, but only because I've just finished it and it's freshest in my mind. A quick survey of reviews from the end of the year will reveal plenty of games for which the general consensus is that they needed a bit more time to come together. But most publishers don't care so much about polish or the delicate sensibilities of their developers or even the end-user experience -- they have stockholders to appease, and nothing makes a stockholder crankier than falling revenue because a big Q4 release slipped into the next year. So we end up with games like Kane & Lynch, or Creed -- games that could have been real gems for 2008 but ended up marred by massive flaws because they were pushed out the door for 2007. Even Mass Effect, which I thoroughly enjoyed, could have stood another few months of spit-shine to smooth out those framerates and physics glitches and audio irregularities.

Fortunately, this trend actually seems to be on the wane -- tons of titles were pushed back to this year, from Metal Gear Solid 4 and Smash Bros. to lesser games like Army of Two. So maybe there's hope?

2. Novelty stretched beyond the breaking point



Not so great, Your Majesty. Not so great.

I've mentioned this before, but the fact that I'm sick of Katamari Damacy breaks my tiny heart. How does something go from being the freshest, quirkiest, most original thing to hit the scene in ages to a stale, tired, unimaginative rehash in just three short years? The answer: poor publisher stewardship. Creativity and innovation are precious assets, but they can be spent quickly. Namco Bandai has burned through the Katamari series' capital by ignoring what made the original so appealing -- the fact that it was totally unlike anything else -- and by returning time and again to a simple gameplay concept without adding anything substantial to freshen it up. To make it worse, the PSP and Xbox 360 versions play worse than the PS2 entries.

Certainly Beautiful Katamari isn't the only offender. WarioWare blew my mind in 2003; and while the Wii version was certainly competently made, I had to struggle to finish the game for my review. It all felt so predictable and hackneyed. Cooking Mama seems likely to be the next victim -- it's become Majesco's golden goose, the unexpected sleeper hit that rescued the company from insolvency, and I dread the inevitable annual updates for both Wii and DS (and who knows what else), each progressively less interesting than the next. Sigh.

1. Nintendo Wii



Yeah, Nintendo Wii disappointed me more than anything else in 2007. No, this isn't about the system being underpowered, and it's not some reactionary freakout about casual games killing the industry. On the contrary, I think those are actually two of the system's strongest selling points: it caters to a different crowd than usual, and it demonstrates quite decisively that sheer graphical prowess isn't necessary for good gaming. I'll take Mario Galaxy over Gears of War any ol' day, thanks. I've been an advocate of Nintendo's outside-the-box approach since I took home my first DS in 2004 and watched my elementary school-aged cousins take immediately to it in a way they never had with any other gaming system. Wii has the opportunity to shake up gaming and force everyone to rethink what the medium is all about. And it's doing that, to a degree. But....

I guess it's Nintendo I'm disappointed in, not the Wii. The company has an amazing opportunity to revolutionize gaming (hence the system's code-name!), and it's doing a great job with its first-party content -- games that give us new (and often better) ways to approach old genres, and games that ignore genre conventions to give us entirely new experiences. But look beyond the first-party content and the Wii landscape is bleak. Worse than it was on N64. Worse than on GameCube. At least with GameCube Nintendo made an effort to court big-name exclusives like Resident Evil 4. This time around it's clear they don't even care to try, and the resulting third-party content is overwhelmingly bargain-bin trash. Here's a system that, by the numbers, has twice the horsepower of GameCube -- yet inexplicably most games for the system look worse than low-budget Dreamcast software. And play much, much worse.

It didn't have to be like that; the fact that Wii is an inexpensive system to develop for should have made it a safe harbor for small developers who can't really afford to spend the money to create a high-quality HD title. But no, they're mostly sticking with PlayStation 2, probably because it has a massive existing userbase (and no hardware shortages). Meanwhile, the opportunists see lots of hype for Wii, lots of inexperienced buyers flocking to the system, and Nintendo's policy of letting publishers ship anything for the system regardless of quality. Dollar signs appear in their eyes: here's a perfect opportunity to churn out crap that Sony's approvals department would have nixed for PS2, taking advantage of consumers who don't have a clue for how to go about shopping for good games, raking in tons of quick cash. Nintendo's official line is that consumers will sort it out on their own -- a typically glib mindset from their PR wonks, and one that's likely to be true in ways they don't anticipate. Consumers will sort it out on their own, but chances are that they'll do so by deciding that these video game things aren't that fun after all and they'd rather not waste their money on them, thanks.

Meanwhile, the shovelware ships at $20-30, meaning that anyone who wants to sell a substantial, well-made game for $50 is out of luck if the box doesn't have Mario, Pikachu or Link on it. Zak & Wiki got great reviews... and tanked. Trauma Center doesn't seem to have done so well. And No More Heroes might do OK in the states, but Japan was so disinterested that the director reportedly sat at a table for a launch-day signing in Tokyo's Akihabara district and no one showed up. I don't doubt that Wii will remain hot and profitable throughout 2008... but Nintendo had a truly rare opportunity with Wii, a chance to change the ground rules for hardcore gaming even as they birthed the casual market -- a chance to have real, lasting, long-term impact, like the DS has done for portable gaming. But at this point, I fear, the damage is done, and the Wii market is destined to be a dumping ground for amateurish budget games. Nintendo's stunning first-party games will be king of the hill as always, but that's cold comfort when the hill turns out to be a heap of trash.

I had hoped for better.

(Dishonorable mention: The final boss of Metroid Prime 3, which took one of gaming's most memorable villains and turned her into one of those generic "spin around the room" bosses that you've seen in a dozen crappy 3D platformers. I still haven't finished MP3, actually, because I reached that last boss and was so disheartened by what they had done to Mother Brain that I didn't couldn't bring myself to hit "continue" when I died. What an abysmal finale to a great trilogy.)

posted by: | category: games | forums | 41 comments | §

Weekness

28 January 08 | 15:26

I've added a (rough) GameSpite Network section to the sidebar links, which is basically a pretentious way of driving traffic to sites hosted on this server. It looks like all of them are at least somewhat in action, so: please to be visiting Kolbe, Mightyblue, M.Nicolai, Reibeatall, Sharkey and VsRobot. Fluffy bunnies await.

New Game +
Remember how last week I said gaming was back with a vengeance or whatever? Yeah, well, false alarm. The latest slate of releases is less "vengeance" than "half-hearted crime." Like holding up a 7-Eleven and only taking the silver change from the register.


Add to Queue
As ever, the new batch of home video releases is much stronger than the latest batch of games. That is because film is a thriving artform with a stunning breadth of variety and people take time to recognize more than just the big-budget crap. It's, like, the opposite of gaming. (On the other hand, this week does see the release of Rez HD, so maybe my snark is misplaced.)

posted by: | category: blog, film, games | forums | seven comments | §

Ah, whoops

27 January 08 | 11:48

I finished another of my backlog titles yesterday, Assassin's Creed. I even wrote up a critique here, but then it turned out to be entirely too long for a blog post and I decided to hold on to it for GameSpite Issue 4. (Which should go up within the week.) So, if you happen to be one of the handful of people who receive email autonotifications of updates to the site... congratulations, you've just seen a very sloppy rough draft.

Sadly, while I'm one title down on the pile I added two this past week: Burnout Paradise and No More Heroes. I'm on Heroes for EGM, so that should go down pretty quickly. I'd be done with it by now, of course, except that Ubisoft wasn't kidding about taking their ball and going home in tears because our reviewers had the audacity to call Creed on its (I can now say with confidence) palpable shortcomings. It's so strange to see large corporations acting like cranky children at playtime. I mean, I know Creed is a "sandbox" game and all, but I'm pretty sure that's not what it's supposed to mean.

Anyway, once Heroes is out of the way I guess I'll go after something on Mac-based. Baldur's Gate, perhaps? Deus Ex? No One Lives Forever? So many options, so little time.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 22 comments | §

A thousand thousand slimy things

25 January 08 | 19:37

I've just finished reading Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency for the first time since it was originally published. The copyright indicia tells me that was 1987, which would go a long way toward explaining why I enjoyed it so much more now than I did when I was... 12. I read and re-read the Hitchhiker's books when I was in sixth grade and they opened my eyes to a much more sophisticated and elegant form of humor than I had ever seen on television, and Dirk Gently was an enormous disappointment. It was barely funny at all, and the plot didn't really make sense. Why, the book didn't even have a real ending!

I guess my seventh-grade mind just wasn't ready for quantum mechanics and chaos theory. Reading it now I realize it's an incredibly clever novel, a brilliant puzzle box constructed of words. I've been reading a lot of William Gibson lately, and his text tends to demand careful scrutiny because it's dense and abstract; Dirk Gently requires scrutiny because it seems light and brisk, but every sentence has the potential to be laden with hidden meaning or unexpected ramifications.

But what does the Electric Monk have to say about it?



Well, of course he does.

posted by: | category: media | forums | sixteen comments | §

Trite, complete end-of-year thing #1: Crackdown

24 January 08 | 15:51

The best game of 2007 was... gosh, I don't even know. So many candidates. It definitely wasn't Crackdown, a deeply flawed and laughably shallow exercise in comic book violence. And yet, I enjoyed it more than anything else I played last year. (Except maybe Metal Gear Solid 3, but that doesn't really count, since that was a "pile of shame" thing.)

How could this be? The answer is simple: I am a complete sucker for sandbox video games.



Crackdown
Real-Time Worlds/Microsoft | Xbox 360 | Action

Of course, the term "sandbox game" is inherently meaningless. The idea behind the phrase is meant to denote a wide-open world that allows free-form gameplay which may not coincide with the precise objectives that the developers had in mind for you. In the hands of a cynical developer, this is a crutch for creators who were too lazy to create worthwhile goals of their own ("Eh, the consumer can make his own fun,"); in more ambitious hands, it means immense freedom that let the player approach the structured, "designed" portion of a game with an enormous amount of flexibility. Usually Grand Theft Auto III is credited with sparking the current craze for sandbox games (or maybe Shenmue), but they've been around much longer: The Sims, Tail of the Sun on PSOne, SimCity before that, even Ultima IV, really. But honestly, any game can be a sandbox. I had a friend in high school whose only interest with Super Mario Bros. 3 was to hang around in a little valley in one of the first worlds and jump on Goombas until time ran out. It was infuriating to watch, because it seemed so utterly pointless to an objective-oriented player like me. But it made her happy, and if you're having fun with a game who's to say you're not playing it right?

Eh, that's just semantic dickering, but it does relate to Crackdown. Because Crackdown is very much the definition of a sandbox game. It's shaped in the mold of GTA, to a degree: it's set in a large and completely open urban environment, it's very violent, it involves frequent carjacking. Unlike GTA, though, it's absolutely non-linear. The game gives you a single objective: to take down the various crime lords who have set up camp in the three different districts of Pacific City. You can go right after them from the first moments of the game, which is completely foolhardy because you'll almost certainly die instantly. It's foolhardy -- but it's possible. A better tactic is to go in the game's intended sequence, which is to take down the weakest gang, then the Russian gang, then the multi-national genetics corporation. Better, but not strictly required. And within each gang, the better strategy is to gun for the low-level enforcers before taking down their leader; not only does this beef up your stats, it also weakens the boss by reducing the general health of the gang. But you don't have to do it that way.



It's a very clever idea that has its roots in western-developed PC RPGs. Of course, it plays out rather differently here, as I don't think an awful lot of PC RPGs had you playing a super-powered police agent ascending buildings and creating general mayhem in a cityscape set 20 minutes into the future. Details, details. Crackdown has some other RPG-ish elements, I guess -- namely, leveling up. But what game doesn't, these days?

The leveling system in Crackdown is a bit of genius, though. Adding levels to an action game is an inherently difficult proposition -- traditional RPG categories like "luck" and "wisdom" don't really apply to a game where you're mostly running and shooting. Crackdown, though, offers palpable rewards for pursuing levels. Pacific City is a giant playground of skyscrapers and automobiles and people who want to kill you, and as you upgrade your agent you find you'll have an easier time of using these game elements to their full potential. When you start out, you're tough... by the end of the game, though, you're a total monster, capable of punching a dude so hard he flies a hundred meters, able to make half a city block explode with a well-placed rocket. And most importantly, you can leap higher.



It's the parkour element that truly makes Crackdown addictive. If you see a high point, you can climb to it. And if not, you can climb to slightly less high places and find some Agility Orbs, which will eventually add up to a level boost that will help you scale that previously insurmountable peak. Other sandbox games tend to take place at ground level, forcing you to scurry about the streets. In Crackdown, buildings are a minor obstacle to be scaled in order to give you an advantage over the bad guys. Just ask Anakin -- holding the high ground is everything when it comes to combat. And the online co-op gameplay was fantastic, too, since it basically set another person loose in your city to help you, hinder you, or just run off to their own chunk of the city and do something completely different than you. I didn't do as much co-op as I would have liked, but our previews minion Alice joined me for a few hours that mostly involved us trying to set up jenga-esque piles of girders to throw one another across the docks. It was essentially the equivalent of standing in a little valley jumping on Goombas for an hour, but it was fun -- so who's to say we weren't playing the game "right"?

Oh, Crackdown has its shortcomings. There's a notable lack of truly worthwhile enemies to deal with; by the end of the game, nothing can stop you. The enemy bosses lack variety, and the story is pretty dumb. Some of the weapons are kind of pointless -- once you crank up your gun skill, there's no reason to go with anything but the Shai-Gen pistol and the homing rocket launcher to let you blow up anything you can't take down in a single headshot. Enemies don't scale up, so if you go out of the intended mission sequence you'll find the guys you skipped are a total cakewalk. But compared to 2007's other big sandbox adventure, Assassin's Creed, Crackdown does a much better job of keeping the player engaged until the end -- new abilities and skill enhancements are doled out as you play, each target requires considerably different tactics. It even does those inevitable random pickups that litter this sort of game well -- not only do the collectable orbs make a sound effect when you're nearby to help you home in on them even if you can't see them, grabbing them adds considerably to your agent's repertoire of skills. Yes, an actual, tangible reward for going to the trouble of searching every nook and cranny, not just Gamerscore points. What an inspiration!

So no, it's not perfect. But it's the only game I loved enough to play through twice in 2007. And coming at the expense of plenty of other perfectly deserving games as it did, that says something.



Oh, yeah, one last thing. If Crackdown were music? It would be your favorite guilty pleasure band. The one you know isn't really that good, but you love it anyway, and screw all the haters. So Journey, I guess. Which means that even though Real-Time Worlds isn't working on a sequel yet, well.... don't stop believin'.

Also: Retronauts is back. Like, really back. Our new full-time Podcast Producer will kick our butts if we slack off. Enjoy the magic of 1997! Next time: something something.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 22 comments | §

Red ring of deathwatch: Day 5

24 January 08 | 08:29

First it deleted some Tomb Raider Anniversary saves. What other zany hijinks have my Xbox 360 been up to?

• System occasionally powers down automatically a few seconds after being activated.
  
• Assassin's Creed has a 50% chance of crashing at the title screen.

Stay tuned for more exciting developments! "Exciting" in this case meaning "irritating."

posted by: | category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

Revenge of the fourth column

22 January 08 | 10:10

Hey, look, it's weekly columns. They should have been posted yesterday, but alas it was a holiday. (Translation: I am lazy.)

Add to Queue
Hey, it's movies on video and stuff. Nothing that appeals to me personally this week, but I did see Cloverfield over the weekend. It was pretty good, but I realize at some point it will be released in a high-definition format, which is pretty much going to be the biggest waste of the technology imaginable.


New Game +
Aaaand gaming is back. After a few months of comatose uselessness, the industry has roused from its eldritch slumber and unleashed upon humanity something like four notable games all at once. Even an interesting third-party game for Wii! Possibly the last ever. So I recommend you run out and buy a copy of No More Heroes, because it is part of a rare and endangered species.

posted by: | category: film, games | forums | 19 comments | §

Pavlovian slaver at the cash till ring of success

20 January 08 | 18:45

So, I'm about seven or eight hours into Assassin's Creed. So far so good! But then, I'm a sucker for open worlds where I'm at liberty to do pretty much whatever.



Except that I'm not really free to do whatever, it seems. I'm free to investigate a dude, kill him and also collect flags. And maybe shove beggars out of the way. From what I understand, I've seen about all the game has to offer at this point and the rest of the adventure is basically the same thing ad nauseum for another 25 or 30 hours. I will reserve judgment until I've seen for myself, though. Still, given what I know, I expect the arc of my experience will be...

• Hour zero: This game is clunky and awkward.
  
• Hour one: OK, I get it. Cool.
  
• Hour four: Oh, so that's how combat works in full. Nice. Now to find the next View Point.
  
• Hour eight: This is rad!
  
• Hour sixteen: This is... less rad, now.
  
• Hour thirty-two: It's time for something else. Anything else. Please.

Ah well. I suppose if it becomes too tiresome, I can always count on Travis Touchdown to rescue me from a gritty-but-cartoonish American vision of medieval Jerusalem in favor of a ridiculously cartoonish Japanese vision of modern America.

Also of note: This site now host a few other sites. Sharkey's host went insane (well, more insane) and locked him out of his site, so it can be found here until solidsharkey.com is pointing in the right direction again. And a few site contributors now have their own blogs -- Mightyblue has a home for his anime musings and I assume VsRobot will be using his own space to host his Add to Queue podcast. Maybe? And there are a couple of others, but currently their pages consist of (1) a blank index directory and (2) a photo of a bunny, respectively. I'm going to assume that these are merely placeholders and not avant-garde performance art pieces and refrain from providing links until they're ready.

posted by: | category: games | forums | eight comments | §

Flushing the Backlog: another one down

19 January 08 | 15:36

My Pile of Shame has been reduced by one today, sort of. I cleared Tomb Raider Anniversary off the stack... though unfortunately not because I finished it. I made it about halfway through the game, having just cleared the fire room in Greece that was my bête noir back in the day, when the game decided to corrupt my save files and dump all my progress. Awesome! I don't know if this is a sign of an incipient Red Ring of Death or simply crappy programming by whomever Crystal Dynamics tapped to port the game to Xbox 360 -- given the legendary shoddiness of Microsoft's system and the chugging framerate and mushy controls in this version of Anniversary, my guess is "equal measures columns A and B."

Rather than shout at the heavens and tempt them to strike me down, I've decided to move along a new venture for the time being. That venture being Assassin's Creed, the single most controversial game of 2007, apparently. Is it truly a game so crappy that it deserves to have the word "ass" in its title twice? Or do I work with a bunch of addlepated morons who can't appreciate unbridled genius, meaning Ubi's PR team was totally right to take their toys and go home after we dared give the game less than a perfect score? Seeing for myself, I think, will present an interesting experience. I go forth with eyes unclouded by hate, etc. etc.

Of course, I'm bracing myself for the arrival of the dreaded RROD. Anyone know if there's a way to siphon all your 360 save files to some sort of backup medium? I'd like to keep my 40-hour everything-totally-done Mass Effect Paragon clear data for use in the sequel, if at all possible. Maybe I should hold off on Creed until I get this sorted out.



Tomb Raider Anniversary
Crystal Dynamics / Eidos | Xbox 360 | Action | 2007

In a way I'm slightly relieved that I had to put 'er down like Ol' Yeller, because my feelings about this game teeter wildly between love and hate. What really kept me going was revisiting all of the fantastic environments of the original game, presented in a fairly gorgeous fashion. Anniversary made the world seem a lot less claustrophobic by brightening things up and opening up the ceilings to clear sky from time to time, but at the same time was very faithful to the original game. And it's surprising just how well I remember Tomb Raider's environments nearly 11 years after since I last touched the game -- maybe because it was the first 3D world I was given to explore in its entirety. (Yeah, I played Mario 64 first, but I always felt like Tomb Raider had more immersive and thoughtful level design. Blasphemy?)

Sadly, as much as I appreciate the modern recreation of a severely dated classic, as much as I respect the developers trying to make the original levels work with Legend's control scheme and environmental gimmicks... it doesn't always work. I've found myself dying far often in Anniversary than I did in the original version of the game. Primitive as it was, the early Tomb Raiders were built on a grid, and that worked in the player's favor for tricky jumps -- you didn't have to worry about veering off course or missing your mark. Everything was mechanically precise. Maybe not the most realistic approach, but effective for a video game. By giving you analog control in a world original designed to be digital, Anniversary introduces a potential for imperfection that didn't exist in the original game -- nor in Legend, for that matter, since Legend was designed from the ground up to work with a contemporary control scheme. This has the net effect of making Anniversary feel at once more fluid than the game it's based on, yet clumsier at the same time.

Still, it's all worth it to be able to see those brilliant levels one last time. The wide-open colosseum, the Indiana Jones-style Tomb of Qualopec, and most of all the dizzying, daunting St. Francis' Folly. And I suppose I'll go back and take another shot at the game, someday... I totally missed out on Egypt, and that is simply not acceptable.

posted by: | category: games | forums | fourteen comments | §

Trite, moot, end-of-year thing #2: Etrian Odyssey

17 January 08 | 12:22

If nothing else, 2007 was at least the year that I finally extricated myself from the JRPG blinkers I'd been wearing for a decade and reminded myself why western role-playing games were so popular back in the day. Mass Effect's sci-fi patina helped quite a bit, since I still find the high fantasy settings most western RPGS use to be agonizingly uninteresting. (Yes, I know... except for Fallout and Planescape -- they're on my list.) But I took baby steps first, beginning with Final Fantasy XII, an inspired mash-up of many opposites, including Western and Japanese design sensibilities. But the true hero was a game that most people didn't even notice, and even fewer liked.

But those who like it, love it. That game, of course, is:



Etrian Odyssey
Atlus | Nintendo DS | RPG

In metaphorical musical terms, Etrian Odyssey is a Beatles tribute band. Yeah, a few of the Beatles are still around, but they're more or less self-parodies at this point. But this group gets back to the spirit of their original, groundbreaking recordings, reproduces them flawlessly, and throws in a few neat studio tricks to make those old tunes feel relevant and modern again.

Etrian Odyssey is a pretty incredible game, really. Incredible, because it means someone said, "Wouldn't it be awesome to create an RPG that blows off 25 years of genre evolution and basically recaptures the core gameplay of the old Wizardry PC games?" Incredible because someone green-lighted it. Incredible because an American publisher said, "We should bring this indescribably niche game to Americans!" And most incredible of all? The fact that it all worked out beautifully.


Etrian Odyssey ("Yggdrasil Labyrinth" in Japan, and presumably changed for the U.S. because it arrived right on the heels of Atlus' Yggdra Union) is unapologetically limited in scope, unabashedly geared toward hardcore gamers, unrelentingly difficult, and unrepentantly addictive. Although its gameplay is wholly based on exploration punctuated by random encounters, it strikes a very deliberate balance and pacing. It's a slow game, but not because you move at a pokey pace, or because random counters happen every few steps. On the contrary, you cruise through the labyrinth pretty quickly, and enemy attacks are measured in their frequency. In fact, you can generally predict when each new encounter will happen thanks to a simple threat indicator in the corner of the screen -- it slowly transitions from green to red, giving you plenty of time to brace yourself, heal up and prepare.

No, the deliberate nature of Etrian Odyssey comes in its character advancement. Level-ups aren't handed out like candy as they are in most JRPGs; you have to fight through quite a few battles to reach your next experience level. But those advances mean a lot -- nothing so dramatic as Tactics Ogre, where a single level is the difference between "overwhelmed" and "overpowered," but nevertheless significant, because each new level grants a few skill points that allow your warriors to boost their stats, skills and specializations.


As with all the best RPGs, Etrian's strength is the sense of ownership it gives you. It has no real story to speak of, so instead the role-playing element takes the guise of character-building. Each player's party is radically different than the next's; one might choose to go with a fairly standard spread of classes and min-max each warrior's abilities to balance one another's weaknesses, while another might go with an unconventional crew of largely defensive front-row characters and a back row emphasizing buffs and debuffs. Or the "battle medic," a healer whose makes use of the class' hidden potential for advanced offensive skills. Or whatever. You even get to choose from four different cosmetic variants per class -- which isn't as superfluous as you might think, since your party of five is drawn from a guild that can consist of quite a few potential participants. A popular strategy in the early going is to create a team of rangers specializing in resource hunting whose role is to do nothing more than venture to a gathering point near the entrance to the labyrinth and collect salable goods. And while classes whose trade is primarily in status effects aren't much good in the first few strata, where raw survival is the most important consideration, they're indispensable further along.

In other words, Etrian Odyssey offers plenty of strategic options -- but whatever strategy you choose, you'd better make damn good use of it.

That's nice and all, but ultimately there are two factors that keep Etrian from being a mere dungeon hack. The first is the deadly F.O.E. -- no mere random encounter, F.O.E.s are incredibly powerful monsters that lurk at specific points on the map, roaming and patrolling and often reacting to the party's presence with swift violence. You can see them on the map, and in fact you can see them in the 3D exploration view as well, although at that point you're likely doomed. Taking down F.O.E.s becomes progressively more challenging as the game advances, especially once they begin operating in tandem. Oh, and it's always a good idea to make sure your random encounter meter is low when a F.O.E. is around since F.O.E.s move a space on the map for every round of combat... and often right toward the party. Nothing is worse than a random fight against fairly low-level creatures that turns into a desperate fight for survival because you didn't finish quickly enough and a F.O.E. joined the battle. Reaching a new level of the labyrinth is a satisfying experience, sure, but besting all the F.O.E.s in that floor is when you know you've really made it.


Secondly, and most importantly in my book, is the mapping system. Someone at Atlus had the brilliant inspiration to use the DS's bottom screen as virtual graph paper, transporting us back to the days when video games were grids and no serious player went on an adventure without a stack of graph paper by his side. Back in the NES days, I had a ream of maps -- screen-by-screen breakdowns of Metroid, The Goonies II, The Guardian Legend -- and Etrian captured that fantastic sense of progress by minimizing the scope of the automap and forcing players to mark out the details themselves. It might seem a small thing, but watching as your empty grid becomes 25 "sheets" of fully-detailed dungeon layouts gives the adventure a sense of fulfillment that even a poweful party of high-level warriors can't match.

My only regret is that the whole "objectivity" thing meant I couldn't review it myself. (The lead localization editor is a good friend and former roommate, so you can see the potential for conflict of interest, no?) EGM gave it a wildly varied spread of scores (ranging from 4.0 to 8.0, I think). And that's fair, because Etrian definitely is a love-it-or-hate kind of thing. But it meant I didn't really have a venue for commenting about the game until now, when it's pretty much sold out everywhere and my comments do nothing to help it. But hey, at least there's the sequel to look forward to, right?

posted by: | category: games | forums | 24 comments | §

Trite, late, end-of-year thing #3: Mass Effect

16 January 08 | 21:27

Ha! Ha! This should have been done a week ago. I suck.

Mass Effect
BioWare / Microsoft | Xbox 360 | RPG

I started writing about Mass Effect, but then it blossomed into a long, rambling thing that couldn't fit in this space, so I guess it's its own article now. Actually, the article is mostly just digression. And here you thought I'd outgrown that crap.

But of course, certain traditions must be observed:

If Mass Effect were music, it would be a rock opera. Big, grandiose, full of itself, alternately pretentious and preposterous... and wholly fantastic, if you can accept the blemishes as mere character flaws and simply appreciate its glorious fusion of narrative and rocking out. That Commander Shepard sure plays a mean pinball.

Few games in recent memory have drawn me in as deeply as Mass Effect. Yeah, it has problems. Yeah, the combat mechanics took a few hours to nail down. Yeah, I wanted to claw out my eyeballs after tooling around the 20th shiny rocky landscape in an excessively bouncy vehicle. But the game universe, the characters, the visuals, the shockingly smooth narrative presentation -- they all more than made up for the long elevator rides and bumpy framerates and the fact that half my crew consisted of boring ciphers. I particularly liked the role that humanity played in the game: rather than being an all-conquering purveyor of pure awesome or a mewling, helpless victim of cosmic bullying, the human race is roughly on par with its CETI peers and maintains an uneasy (but not completely unfriendly) relationship with them. Also, being briefed on mission objectives by Lance Henriksen is totally sweet.

Is Mass Effect a better game, objectively speaking, than something like BioShock or Halo 3? Probably not. But it offered me the freedom of choice that BioShock merely gave lip service to, and it fleshed out its vast intergalactic world in a far more satisfying way than Halo. The end result was a game that made me a part of something big, yet let me feel like I was actually in control -- like the decisions I made mattered. Being a galactic goody-goody has never been more satisfying.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

I'd better activate my prayer capsule

15 January 08 | 20:38

I accomplish very little these days with my life, so I am willing to settle for any victory, however small. This weekend, I cleared two games off my looming tower of shame. Not exactly a triumph of the human spirit, but at least it's something.



Ico
Sony CEA | Adventure | PlayStation 2 | 2002

I finally finished Ico. Only, uh, five years late? Fantastic. It was something of a mistake to wait so long to play it, though -- not that I meant to put it off for so long, mind you, but every previous attempt I've made to complete the game had been tragically derailed by diverse complications, from moving across the country to sheer ennui. Not this time, though. Nope, I clawed my way through to the end. And... it was okay.

No, that's a lie. It was quite a bit better than okay. But Ico today is a game that's more easily appreciated for what it represents than for what it actually is; it was hugely influential and has done more to define a genre than anything since, I dunno, Grand Theft Auto. The slightly abstract visuals, the HUD-free interface, and of course the leaping and crawling and climbing through massive, solemn environments... I can't really think of too many action-adventure type games that haven't been touched by Ico. Alas, they've also improved considerably on its gameplay, smoothing over and refining it and generally taking a bunch of raw, inspired ideas and working them into forms that work just a little bit better all around. The only thing I haven't seen done better is the wordless, co-dependent connection shared by Ico and Yorda -- the emotional heart of the game that propels the game even as it occasionally frustrates. The final sequence was absolutely fantastic, and the happy buzz you take away probably has a lot to do with why people love Ico so dearly.

I also think it's a mistake to use Ico as the poster child for "games as art," but that is a debate I don't want to ever have to bear witness to. Just thinking about it makes my brain shrivel a bit in disgust.



Beautiful Katamari
Namco Bandai | Action | Xbox 360 | 2007

I also cleared the latest iteration of Katamari Damacy off my stack, but unlike Ico I didn't actually finish the whole thing. That's partly because Namco Bandai wants me to cough up twelve bucks to access bits of game that already exist on the disc they sold me, but mostly because Beautiful Katamari is pretty crappy. Apparently the more a Katamari game costs, the worse it plays.

It's a little heartbreaking to think that a game that was the freshest thing going just a few years ago is now stultifying dull. And for some reason the control is really crappy on 360. And the side missions stink. Why, the 10,000º stage has been determined by science to be constructed of anti-fun (a kind of elementary particle that destroys all fun with which it comes into contact). Speaking as one of those annoying, loudmouthed import-loving types who gushed about the original game back when its release in America seemed like the most preposterous notion ever, the series' progressive crappening is just one more reason to hate video games forever.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 25 comments | §

Dropping Monday hate like Garfield, yo

14 January 08 | 11:35

You know, the comics have it all wrong. The real problem with Mondays isn't spiders or lack of lasagna or whatever. It's the fact that every Monday we publish these game and movie release columns, which serve as a stark testament to the shallow horribleness of modern culture.

Add to Queue | Weekly DVD Release Column
See, this is totally what I'm talking about. OK, so maybe ''Extras'' is good, but Xenosaga was turned into an anime that somehow managed to screw up even the easy, can't-miss parts. We're doomed. And when movies about Dane Cook as a sexed--up ladykiller pass as entertainment, you know things are about to go the way of the Roman Empire.

New Game + | Weekly Game Release Column
And come to that, Samurai Warriors: Katana is pretty much a calling card for the Visigoths. "Dear sirs, our emperor appears to be an inbred halfwit and our senate is a corrupt figurehead institution and the lead in our aqueduct pipes has given us all brain damage. Someone, somewhere will be paying money for Miami Nights. Please sack our nation for our own benefit."

posted by: | category: games, media | forums | 19 comments | §

A follow-up

11 January 08 | 15:37

Well, at least she spelled "Ziff" right.



Listed the wrong floor, too.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | 24 comments | §

grammer is for loser

10 January 08 | 18:26

I just got off the phone with UPS -- someone mailed a package to my office without specifying which floor of the building to send it to. I'm not exactly sure how they tracked down my phone number, but I suppose it's better not to ask. Anyway, I was trying to explain to the lady how to spell "Ziff-Davis" without much success:

"Z-I-F-F D-A-V-I-S."
"So that's V as in Van..."
"No, Z. As in Zebra. Z-I-F-F D-A-V-I-S. Ziff-Davis Media."
"Ziff-Davis what?"
"Mee-dee-uh."
"OK, so that's Z as in Xylophone...."

That's when I gave up.

posted by: | category: blog | forums | thirteen comments | §

Magical mystery tumor

09 January 08 | 21:20

It's interesting to see how people are trying to psychoanalyze me based on the "favorite games of 2007" I've been recapping. But while I have been trying to broaden my horizons and capture the best games on every system, from both America and Japan, the preponderance of American-made games on the list doesn't indicate some major seismic shift in my tastes. Besides, what preponderance? So far it's a 50-50 split, with mostly Japanese games on the "almost but not quite" list. Ah, the joy of overreaction.

No, it has more to do with the fact that Japan has pretty much given up. A few months ago I wrote a retro feature for EGM chronicling average scores for major console titles over the years, and it was interesting to see the way American titles slowly began to creep in and eventually dominate the lists. The big sea change happened around 2003 or so. Japan's output last year was pretty frickin' sad -- aside from a small handful of genuinely notable games, most of the best eastern games were remakes and rereleases of classic titles -- particularly Dracula X Chronicles and Final Fantasy Tactics -- or were barely upgraded sequels -- Pokémon comes to mind -- or were designed for people who have never touched a video game before. And 2008 is looking even drearier.

In other words, I still love Japanese games. They just don't love me anymore.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

Whoops

08 January 08 | 20:43

I forgot to mention:

If BioShock were music, it would basically be Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon: a dense, meticulously crafted work that stands as a breakout hit for a creator who's been an underground favorite for years. While it generally obeys the rules and structures of a specific genre, its occasional divergences into other forms and new concepts are alternately its best and worst moments.

And if you pay attention to all the embedded sounds hidden throughout the work as added texture, a very interesting story begins to take shape.

posted by: | category: games | forums | seven comments | §

Trite end-of-year thing #4: BioShock

08 January 08 | 10:57

And the series continues, delayed now well beyond the point of irrelevance. At this point, my fourth favorite game of 2007 -- BioShock -- is practically retro.

What's that, you say? I already mentioned BioShock and disqualified it from inclusion in this list because I hadn't finished it? Well, yes, that's true. But I did finish it in 2007, and figured my original number six title (Illustlogic, an import-only DS game that's exactly like Picross except vastly better) wouldn't be terribly missed if I squeezed it out in favor of Irrational's shooter/adventure thing. Sorry, Illustlogic. I had to choose a favorite, so I chose...



...Rapture.

BioShock
Irrational/2K | Xbox 360/PC | FPS, more or less

You know, it's funny to hear that BioShock's story was something that came together only at the end of development, something that evolved radically from its original concepts -- a cult deprogrammer on an island of Nazis or some such -- because it suggests that Irrational (or 2K Boston or whatever they've been forced to rebrand themselves as) spent most of its effort developing BioShock's gameplay. And let's be frank: the gameplay ain't really that great. It's good, no question about it. But overall the action sits uncomfortably at the intersection between pure first-person shooting, Metroid-esque exploration, PC adventuring and role-playing. It's a little of each, but not enough of one to offer any sort of satisfying revelations or innovations.

In fact, BioShock is the furthest thing from innovative, since by all accounts it's pretty much System Shock 2 meets The Little Mermaid -- Shodan goes by another name, and you're Under the Sea, but everything from the plot to the AI hacking is basically the same. Of course, most people haven't played System Shock 2, myself included, so maybe it doesn't matter.

Also, memo to whoever owns System Shock 2: please release for Xbox Live Arcade. Thanks.



The strength of BioShock's gameplay comes in its flexibility; in an era where most entries in the FPS genre are content to bite Halo's two weapons, melee and grenades design -- which, admittedly, is pretty fantastic for console shooters -- BioShock gives you an impressive array of weapons and skills, and the ability to customize your setup at practically any moment. This is quite different from the Metroid Prime approach, where each power-up is required to surmount specific environmental obstacles; progress through BioShock is wholly story-driven, and doors are simply locked until the game allows them to be unlocked. It's every bit as linear as a Prime title, but you have to make actual choices about how you play rather than simply using the latest gun or bomb to beat a new palette-swapped foe before they'll let you out of the room.

My approach was to be a stealthy super-hacker with more emphasis on defense than on offense, turning every single security camera or gun turret into my loving ally against the splicers and lurking invisibly in the shadows while Rapture's defenses did most of my work for me. Besides shocking foes into stunned submission, I rarely messed with offensive plasmids, preferring instead to beef up my combat efficacy through photographic research (one of the more impressive risk-reward structures in recent memory). But I could just as easily have become an elemental powerhouse, freezing enemies before shattering them with a single blow, or an invisible wrench god who earned special bonuses for unexpectedly smacking enemies in the back of the skull.

The only real limitation is the order in which plasmid power-ups are doled out -- a disappointingly arbitrary process, as many of the plasmids I wanted to use didn't show up until late in the game. Given that plasmids are similar in function to the different skill branches of an RPG and aren't prerequisites to progress, I'd much rather have been able to specialize early on and earn advanced abilities in my preferred branch as opposed to having a bunch of unwanted low-level abilities to choose from. Even so, it's good to be able to choose.



And choice, ultimately, is at the heart of BioShock. Or rather, the lack of choice -- besides your power-up selections and of course the much-hyped decision over whether to harvest the Little Sisters' ADAM or set them free, BioShock is a chokingly linear experience in which the player is goaded and guided through a series of challenges and "missions." Just like most modern games of the FPS ilk, really -- but the difference is that BioShock makes the player's involuntary conscription a key plot point.

This is BioShock's true victory: a compelling story built around a genre mechanic that gamers have taken for granted since Half-Life. Or, more accurately, since the original System Shock and its main competitor, Marathon. BioShock begins like any other FPS, with the player thrust immersively into a sticky situation and given instructions by a voice in his ear under the assumption that you'll simply do as you're told, because that's how these games work. But as you begin to piece together the truth of Rapture (doled out in tantalizing dollops via audio diaries scattered throughout the city's ruins), your own role in the story slowly falls into place. Ultimately, everything comes to a head in one of the single most powerful subversions of video game tropes ever crafted, with a major plot twist that comes off as boringly predictable next to the brilliant and shocking use of interactive narrative that accompanies it.



It's at this moment that BioShock cements itself as one of the most brilliantly-conceived games in recent memory, a gripping fusion of story and action whose obedient observance of the rules of gaming makes its abandonment of those expectations all the more powerful.

And the one core narrative choice the player is allowed to make -- whether to help or harvest the Little Sisters -- leads into one of the most beautifully understated endings ever, a quiet minute of narration that brings closure to both the broad plot and the story's underlying themes. (Unless, of course, you choose differently, in which case the ending is something else entirely.) In the end, BioShock's ambitious-but-flawed gameplay and occasional moments of narrative triteness are vehicles for a series of memorable scenarios, punctuated in turn by two or three truly powerful moments... and it's these moments that stick with you once you're done with the adventure. It's not the best game I've played lately, but it might be the most affecting. Which counts for a lot, it turns out.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 25 comments | §

Padding out leftover room

07 January 08 | 11:10

You might notice that the site is still online. This is a small victory, of sorts.

I had intended, going into the new year, to commit to blogging once a day -- and then I became painfully ill and didn't feel up to writing anything just a couple of days into January. A resounding defeat that made me stop and ask, who really cares how often I write stuff here? Existential pontification under the influence of cold drugs is never good, but I managed to stay the course and not completely delete the site despite my brain's insistent insistence that it would be a good idea. So here were are at blog entry 500 -- which is of course only the 500th since the installation of the current backend, slightly more than two years gone by, and doesn't begin to account for the thousands lost to the ether, or more accurately lost to previous realizations of the sobering insignificance of this entire website venture -- and, who knows, maybe I can prove a point and be at entry 867 in a year's time. Or maybe not!

In any case, I think this website does serve a valuable purpose. To date, it's helped disabuse me of the delusions that (1) I could be a competent fiction author or (2) a capable cartoonist. I intend to embed an autoplay sound effect in the main page, just as soon as I can decide what shattered dreams sound like. And, of course, the site plays host to weekly columns on how to squander your hard-earned and rapidly devaluing dollars:

Add to Queue | Weekly DVD Release Column
The best theatrical releases of 2007 continue to trickle their way home. Also, columnist VsRobot stands over the cooling corpse of HD-DVD and cackles maniacally -- as is his right! Frankly I would have advocated gloating over the corpse of either HD format, regardless of which lost the high noon shootout. This town just weren't big enough for the both of 'em, y'all.

New Game + | Weekly Game Release Column
This week is pretty much the last of the holiday doldrums; the industry is about to shift back into high gear with two or more worthwhile titles per week. 2008 probably won't have as many massive blockbuster titles as 2007 did, but its offering may be even more insidious: tons of games that merit attention because they're simply good, not merely huge.

posted by: | category: blog, film, games | forums | 23 comments | §

Trite end-of-year thing #5: Super Mario Galaxy

02 January 08 | 10:29

I'm still working through Half-Life 2, although I have no idea why anymore. I have this constant sensation that the developers kept saying, "Hey, this part is starting to feel pretty fun. We'd better add something stupid and annoying to balance that out." People talk about "balanced" games, but I don't think that's what they mean.

But maybe I should talk about a game I enjoy with barely any reservations to speak of, instead.



Super Mario Galaxy
Nintendo | Wii | Platformer

If Super Mario Galaxy were music, it would be a song by that one band you used to love -- you know, the one that pretty much defined your tastes when you were growing up, whose every new release was a revelation that made you say, yeah, this is what music is about. But that band changed as the years went by. Maybe they decided to soften up and go the adult contemporary route, catering to the safe security of soccer moms and afternoon radio. Or maybe they simple settled for rehashing the same material over and over again, offering up competent work without its former bite. Or maybe they just settled for remastering and rereleasing their back catalog titles over and over again.

But then that band releases this one song, this single masterpiece, and suddenly you're reminded of why you loved them so much -- why you were so passionate about their music in the first place. For a few minutes, it's all there: the old creative spark, the virtuosic sensation that this is what music is about. And while you're happy, you can't help but feel a sort of bittersweet regret. Because you know that this song is the exception, now, not the rule.

Still, though. What a great song.



Super Mario Galaxy is a game that has become unstuck in time -- it is, seemingly, a relic of a very different era. One where running and jumping and simple, cartoonish play mechanics and aesthetics were what sold. One where Nintendo saw the Mario brand as the perfect receptacle for its innovative, forward-thinking concepts rather than by-the-numbers spin-offs. One where a game could feel at once wholly fresh and comfortably familiar. Mario Galaxy is too straightforward, too earnest for this world... but the world a better place for its having existed, albeit in a tiny, insignificant way.

It's a game that begs many questions. For instance, how did they get the bumblebee so fluffy? No, wait, I mean... how is it possible to recapture the spirit of the classic Mario games, all the way down to the way the classic Mario games were so frequently inventive and unpredictable? Isn't there something inherently self-contradictory about creating something so rooted in tradition yet so new?



If there is, Nintendo never got the memo. Super Mario Galaxy is quintessentially a Mario game, building on the definitive-but-dated gameplay of Super Mario 64 in the same way that Super Mario Bros. 3 built on the original Super Mario Bros. The fundaments are accounted for -- in fact, the fundaments are largely unchanged, 11 years later. Mario's move set doesn't really feature anything wildly new or different. If anything, his abilities have been pared down from 2002's Super Mario Sunshine. No jetpack, no water cannon. His punches are now effectively automated, a skill performed contextually when near a helpless foe rather than the rather un-Mario-like three-mash combo from 64. His one new ability is a spin attack... which is basically a more useful version of a technique picked up Super Mario World.

But Galaxy is smoother than 64 or Sunshine; the camera moves more intuitively, Mario himself moves more fluidly, and some of the basic issues of 3D platforming are quietly negated by subtle tweaks which minimize the frustration that defined the latter portions of his N64 debut. The game is considerably easier to play than its predecessors -- not in a dumbed-down challenge sense, though, but rather in the sense that Mario always seems to do exactly what you want him to do. You may need to pay attention to what you're doing in certain tricky situations, but the guesswork and trial-and-error have been purged from the gameplay. This Mario represents the work of people who really and truly understand how gameplay with a two-dimensional origin should work when thrust onto an extra axis.



The pure simplicity of moving Mario about freed Nintendo's design slaves to making the world around him interesting. Galaxy has probably inspired more people to hate Sunshine than it really should have, but the newfound, revisionist disdain for the series' previous entry comes down to this single core axiom. In Sunshine, Mario could do interesting things in dull places; in Galaxy, Mario can do fairly conservative things in increasingly interesting places. Sure, the action throws him a few curveballs here and there -- high-speed underwater maneuvers via turtle shell, odd and sometimes impractical power-ups -- but the joy of this adventure comes in seeing what unexpected things each new level will do. This ultimately includes (but is not limited to) flight, reversed gravity, 2D platforming, Mario 3-style airships and some of the best boss encounters to grace a Nintendo game in ages. Mario's methods of negotiating these ever-shifting hazards never really changes throughout the course of the game, so you can spend more time appreciating the brilliant environs you're attempting to conquer.

Ultimately, the content of the game is almost a moot point in this "favorites of 2007" listing. Galaxy's true appeal is that it simply works. Despite the complexity of the worlds Mario explores, despite the game's gleeful tendency to literally turn your expectations for a 3D platformer on their head, Galaxy is always intuitive, a pick-up-and-play experience for anyone. That makes it unique among the year's big-name titles, and worthy of retrospective praise regardless of its actual content. But the fact that you're picking up and playing through such engrossing, inventive and often deviously challenging worlds... well, that's what makes it a Mario game in the truest sense.

And it even manages to integrate motion controls in a remarkably un-irritating manner. Truly, a thing of wonder.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 37 comments | §

Inauspicious

01 January 08 | 22:39

2008 is not off to a good start. I woke up this morning feeling completely hung over, which is very strange seeing as I wasn't drinking last night. Then I remembered I was on an airplane three days ago, which is about how long it usually takes for those disgusting airborne diseases filtering through the plane's ventilation system to incubate. Now I'm sitting here, shivering and feverish and groaning and generally miserable. Happy new year.

Of course, the misery could have something to do with the time I sank into Half-Life 2 today. After finishing Bioshock, I decided to jump into Knights of the Old Republic -- a plan which I abandoned after a few hours due to the fact that it's pretty much unplayable on an Xbox 360. This is not an exaggeration. So, I decided to jump to the next game on the Tower of Guilt and tackle the HL2 episodes. Unfortunately, I haven't touched HL2 since I reviewed the PC version and don't remember much beyond the essential equation that Gordon Freeman = The Messiah, so I figured it might be smart to refresh my memory with a second playthrough. And now it's all coming back to me -- the fact that such an interesting, creative and polished game can be so utterly infuriating at times. The airboat sections are pretty much distilled anti-fun, and ultimately I made it about halfway through Ravenholm before calling it a day. The second half of that level has too many poison headcrabs and not nearly enough sawblades, which makes it exactly the opposite of the first half in terms of pure awesome.

Edit: Sorry about all the typos; I was in the process of dying as I wrote this. I survived the night so hopefully the worst of it is over. Although someone just reminded me of the turret section in Nova Prospekt, so now I'm thinking that maybe I'd have been better off dead.

posted by: | category: games | forums | 33 comments | §