2008: This is happy end!

31 December 08 | 17:56 | Posted by:

A good end to a crappy year: GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 arrived today. Someone mentioned in the comments for my last update on the book's status that the listed weight of 16 lbs. seemed a bit light for a box containing more than a hundred 350-page books, and it turns out they were partially correct. The box was 16 lbs. But it was the smallest of seven boxes.



Uh, yeah. I guess I didn't really appreciate the sheer scale of this operation until I saw a palette of books waiting for me at the office.

I brought home a batch of hardcovers to start doing custom sketches, but I confess there's no way I'll be able to ship all of these out right away. I'll be mailing books in the order in which they were purchased and hopefully should have everything distributed by the middle of January -- except, of course, for books ordered after the initial print run was accounted for. I'll have to do a second printing on those, and they'll arrive in February.

Logistical nightmares aside -- I'll definitely be taking a different approach to distribution with Vol. 2 -- this is a great way to close out 2008. The books look fantastic. I don't think anyone will be disappointed! Hopefully.

See you in 2009.

category: gamespite | forums | eight comments | §

Almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a good flight

31 December 08 | 10:55 | Posted by:

I'm pretty sure that after having a miserable flight across the country last Christmas, I asked you people to remind me not to fly at the holidays. But you didn't! So while I was able to see lots of beloved relatives, do various family things to make sure my fiancée and I are properly engaged according to Vietnamese standards, and have a generally fantastic week, I also had to put up with yesterday. And all because you people failed me. For shame.

Yesterday's flight, which was supposed to be a quick three-hour jaunt from DFW to SFO, was a carefully-planned test by the airlines to see just how far they could push their luck without doing anything that would actually justify a refund. Tricky devils. The coup de grace was when they almost (but not quite!) lost my luggage: it didn't show up on the conveyer belt, it wasn't in the rows of misplaced suitcases, but once I was good and angry and had stood in line for a few minutes to report the problem they paged me a split second before I could get to the customer service desk and demand justice. Diabolical.

Anyway, I'm back in San Francisco where the water is potable straight from the tap. That's nice! Growing in Texas, I never appreciated just how disgusting the water there really is. But going back after five years living here, I've discovered Lubbock water tastes like chlorine and Dallas water smells and tastes like mildew. Yum.


On the plus side, I did find Prince Albert in a can. And being the good soul that I am, I let him out.

category: blog | forums | eleven comments | §

Return of the mysterious kitty-bunny

31 December 08 | 08:52 | Posted by: vsrobot

Some of you have asked me how the Mysterious Kitty-Bunny has been doing. If you're not caught up, I wrote about her here. The short version, we found a sickly, starving small kitten living with our rabbits, eating their rabbit feed and attempting to nurse from them. Underweight and anemic, she was adorably heartbreaking and apparently under the delusion that she was a rabbit. Since then, she has moved inside to live with me and my wife and the other cats, and she's got a round little tummy and a feisty disposition.

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category: blog | forums | thirteen comments | §

Add to Queue 71: Overdosed on eggnog edition

29 December 08 | 22:47 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #71 | December 30, 2008

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category: film | forums | five comments | §

Fun with demons

29 December 08 | 09:06 | Posted by: christopher

I recently picked up a used copy of the Devil Summoner: Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon, a Shin Megami Tensei spinoff action-RPG. While the title may be hilariously long, it’s definitely the most mindless fun I’ve ever had with an SMT game. I’ve never played the first title in the series (Raidou Kuzunoha vs. The Soulless Army), but I am sure that this is a tremendous improvement, if only because my two favorite parts of this game’s battle system were apparently not present in the first game.

One of these presumable improvements is the way the battle system manages the use and replenishment of MAG points, which keeps the combat brisk and full of options. Like most SMT games, attacking your enemies’ weak point is practically required to get through even random battles, and Raidou Kuzunoha vs. King Abaddon gives even greater rewards for doing so than normal. When an enemy is hit by an element they are weak against, not only are they stunned, but following up with successive physical attacks will then replenish your MAG. This essentially means that your most powerful attacks restore rather than diminish your MAG supply. While this system is obviously tilted heavily in the player’s favor and might ruin a turn based RPG with a greater focus on resource management, in an action-RPG the ability to easily restore MAG keeps random encounters from becoming a button-mashing chore by widening the possibilities of combat.

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category: games | forums | six comments | §

The 2008 review revue, interlude

28 December 08 | 19:02 | Posted by:

I played Etrian Odyssey II earlier this year, but it was a rushed and incomplete experience. So before I can reevaluate it, I gotta play through it again, you know?

Yes, this is just an excuse to replay an awesome game. So sue me.

category: games | forums | two comments | §

Further proof that awesomeness is genetic

27 December 08 | 20:31 | Posted by:

My sister's Christmas gifts to me were adorned with a pin. Of Catloaf. Made from the same Shrinky-Dink material as the classic Katamari magnets. Sorry, but this means my family is officially more awesome than yours.

category: blog | forums | thirteen comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part seven

27 December 08 | 00:15 | Posted by:

Bionic Commando Rearmed | Grin/Capcom | PSN/XBLA/PC | Retro platformer
I gave it: A | In retrospect, this was: Perfectly fair

Maybe I wasn't the best choice to tackle a remake of Bionic Commando, because the NES game is one of my top five favorite games ever. I've never actually set out to make a top-five-ever list, and in fact I really hate coming up with stupid lists like that. But nevertheless, Bionic Commando is one of my top five favorite games ever. It just is.

So: I didn't really have an unbiased perspective. If Rearmed had been a lousy remake of the game, I'd have hated it with excessive venom; if it had lived up to its legacy, I'd have no choice but to love it. Obviously, given the score I handed out, it turned out to be a worthwhile successor, and I loved it. In fact, my review text was glowing enough that the reviews team was convinced the accompanying score should have been an A+, but I'm old-fashioned and only hand out the top score when a game really, really impresses me. Like, really impresses.

Really, in order to understand why Rearmed is so gosh-darned good, one needs to quantify precisely what made the original version so great. First, it was vigorously innovative for its time. The arcade game that birthed the NES version was an interesting but flawed and ultimately fairly standard action game; for the home version Capcom thoroughly rethought the entire thing. The most obvious connection between the two titles boils down a few pieces of music and the grappling wire that serves as the fulcrum of the gameplay. Beyond that, the home version might as well have been from a completely different franchise: a story-driven, non-linear action game with an open (but structured) level selection format. Secondly, it used its innovations to maximum effect. Each level was progressively more challenging than the last, creating a perfect learning curve that forced gamers to hone their grappling skills in order to succeed. Third, exploding Hitler head.

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category: games | forums | thirteen comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part six

26 December 08 | 12:14 | Posted by:

Mario Kart Wii | Nintendo | Wii | Racing party
I gave it: C (I think?) | In retrospect, this was: Tragically correct

It seems Mario Kart games are a tricky thing to create, which you wouldn't expect to be the case given that every one of them is basically just a variant on the original Super NES game. But whether a given effort succeeds or fails all comes down to the fine details -- the specifics of those variations. For that reason, I'm always wary of a new Mario Kart, because it's better to be pleasantly surprised than tragically disappointed. Sometimes, the surprises are nothing less than fantastic: Mario Kart DS was one of the former, and in fact is one of the best games available for DS. Its Wii-based follow-up, unfortunately, falls into the "tragic disappointment" category.

I've written at length about its shortcomings, and everything I said there holds true. In summary: MK Wii compromises the series' tenuous balance between skill and accessibility by dumbing down its racing mechanics to the point that stupid luck rather than any sort of talent becomes the determining factor of each race. While Nintendo offers some race customization options, you're only rewarded with any sort of progress if you play the game by its awful default rules. There are two crappy tracks for every good one. As in Smash Bros., "high-level play" basically boils down to exploiting a single, simple tactic that drains the game of any entertainment it might actually have to offer. And some of the new embellishments, like the waggle-based mini-boosts, are straight-up dumb.

In retrospect, though, the biggest issue I have with Mario Kart Wii is that it marked the first volley in Nintendo's assault on "core values." Gamers panic about things like Wii Fit and Wii Music, seemingly convinced that Nintendo's catering to a wider audience is the death knell of gaming. That's silly. What is alarming is watching the company diminish its long heritage of great traditional-type games, weakening its internally-developed titles and farming out great franchises to developers who lack the creativity and ambition to uphold those series' quality. Titles like Wii Fit are exciting, forward-thinking attempts to break gaming beyond its stagnant boundaries; titles like Mario Kart Wii are just stagnant. There's room for companies like Nintendo to cater to both hardcore and casual markets, but the company either doesn't realize it or doesn't care.

Of course, it's unfair to hold a single game accountable for a vast corporate failure. But that's OK: I can dislike Mario Kart Wii because it's boring and broken.

category: games | forums | 26 comments | §

Meme resistant design

26 December 08 | 07:26 | Posted by: christopher

After a year of massive overexposure to Portal-related internet memes, I was finally able to play the game myself (thanks to the miracle of Festivus) and learn once and for all whether or not the cake was, in fact, a lie. Despite its fantastic word-of-mouth, I had two major concerns about this game.

First, I was worried that having lived through a year of references to the Weighted Companion Cube would rob this game of its freshness. Secondly, I hate first person games.

My first concern turned out to be no problem at all. Portal’s genuinely funny writing and brilliant integration of narrative and gameplay were too wonderful for even the collective awfulness of the Internet to ruin. Breaking out of the sterile testing areas to explore the unkempt guts of Aperture Science feels truly subversive. As much as I understand in theory that this is an artificial sensation created through thoughtful design, while actually playing I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had discovered some secret way outside the boundaries of the game that the designers never intended.

This is enabled by visual design that is at once minimalist and highly expressive. When you enter the forbidden areas of the Aperture Science laboratory, it's clear that you're breaking the rules. This is not simply because the story tells you so via dialogue, but rather because everything changes, both visually and in terms of how you solve puzzles. The fundamental gameplay mechanics remain the same, but the sterile and familiar objects you spent the first couple hours of Portal getting to know are gone, replaced with a decaying industrial labyrinth you have to learn anew how to interact with. It’s enjoyably disorienting and feels like breaking out of one game and entering another.

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category: games | forums | fourteen comments | §

Slow as Christmas

24 December 08 | 22:12 | Posted by:

I've always wondered what the phrase "slow as Christmas" is supposed to mean, but now I know -- I'm staying at my grandparents' place for Christmas, and the Internet service appears to be wi-fi router linked to a dial-up modem connection.

It's great to be here, though. It certainly beats the sketchy Dallas motel we stayed at last night, with its interior design plucked straight from the black heart of 1972:


By a crazy coincidence, 1972 is also the last time the room appears to have been cleaned:


Mmm, giant cobwebs.

But anyway, Merry Christmas to all. May your holiday be cobweb-free. And if you don't celebrate Christmas either...well, Merry Christmas regardless, and I also hope you have a damn fine pagan or religious celebration of your choosing. And if you don't celebrate anything, enjoy your day off! And if you don't have the day off, well, sorry that everyone else is so chipper and annoying.

category: blog | forums | eight comments | §

Gratitude for the spoony bard

24 December 08 | 06:19 | Posted by: christopher

Embarrassed as I am to admit it, video games did play a part in my decision to learn Japanese. I'll bear the shame of this terrible truth for the rest of my life, and I really wouldn't recommend anyone learn Japanese just for gaming. It's a happy accident that I ended up liking Japan's people and literature, so all that time I spent memorizing kanji wasn't necessarily a complete waste of time. Sometimes, when I read books without English translations by authors like Nakagami Kenji or Kawakami Hiromi, I feel like I am, in a way, doing penance for the part of younger self who thought that the writing in Japanese videogames might be worthwhile.

In my defense, I don’t think this was entirely my fault. The internet told me that the writing in all my favorite SNES RPGs was actually very good in Japanese, and I was gullible enough to believe it. In middle school, I thought that rigid American censorship and shoddy localization were getting between me and what very well could have been the best stories ever created. Sure, Final Fantasy 2 on the SNES might have seemed like a nonsensical children’s fantasy story with poorly developed characters in English, but this was only because its true greatness was hidden behind the veil of poor translation -- so I thought.

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category: games, media | forums | sixteen comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part five

23 December 08 | 19:13 | Posted by:

The World Ends With You | Jupiter/Square Enix | DS | Shibuya fashion death action
I gave it: A- | In retrospect, this was: A bit low!

Square Enix surprised me twice this spring: first with Crisis Core, which I expected to be a mindless abomination but turned out to be a pleasant bit of fluff that secreted away a few genuinely excellent elements amidst the flashy brain-popcorn. But my surprise over not hating Crisis Core was nothing next to my genuinely loving The World Ends With You, which by all appearances was destined to be a stupid, irritating, fatuous, mindless lump of Nomura zipper-fetish whining, wrapped up in a dense and incomprehensible battle mechanic. And god knows the game certainly started off that way: simpering emo-boy Neku, the so-called "hero" of the piece, wore an improbable getup, wallowed in self-pity and hated everyone around him. All I could think was oh god. I was genuinely angry that I'd been assigned to review the game, because its existence pained me. Then something strange happened: the game thoroughly subverted each and every one of my preconceptions.

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category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

Like the leaves on a tree

23 December 08 | 13:58 | Posted by: calorie_mate

I've only put 15 or so hours into Persona 4 right now -– meaning I've barely scratched the surface, if its predecessor is anything to go by -- but I'm enjoying it very much so far. Shocking, I know. I've found a good deal of enjoyment stems from getting to know the NPCs in the town, much as I did in Persona 3. As time marches on, you see the same people react to various plot events, holidays, the weather, etc. -- and in the process, each and every one starts to demonstrate a minor personality, despite delivering only one line of dialogue at a time. Sure, all the main characters have loads of personality too, but who cares what they think when I can hear from the cowardly kindergarten teacher?

It was pure coincidence, but I'm glad I started up Persona 4 right after finishing Mother 3. Playing the two back-to-back has given me some perspective on why exactly I like this so much. In Mother 3, there's an incredibly deliberate push for you to get to know the village and the townsfolk living there, which is only obvious after some spoiler-y changes occur and you suddenly realize how attached you've become. In Persona 3, as the game (and the school year in the game) came to a close, I sincerely felt sad when I realized that I wouldn't be visiting these people every day anymore. In both cases, growing accustomed to the people and setting was exactly why I look back on them now so fondly.

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category: games | forums | eight comments | §

The books have shipped

23 December 08 | 01:18 | Posted by:

...though unfortunately, they're only on the first leg of their journey:

They won't arrive to me until the 31st, and I won't be able to send them along their way until at least the 2nd. I was hoping I'd be able to have these to people for Christmas, but it just wasn't to be. Sorry about that, but at least we're in the same boat -- the slow printing turnaround time has made a mess of my gift-giving plans. Still, I'm just happy that it's all sorted out and that this crazy project is nearing completion. I can't wait until everyone has a copy in their hands.

category: blog | forums | nine comments | §

New Game Plus: Designated downloads for 12/23/08

22 December 08 | 22:19 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

It looks like Santa has made a jolly digital delivery for the year's second-to-last weekly release listing. Up for grabs, we have a classic RPG, a piece of the puzzle pie we never knew was missing, a tower defense game, and what looks like an honest-to-goodness decent WiiWare game. Yeah, I'm surprised, too. Oh, there's also some minigolf thing...meh. And in my typically late fashion, I should probably mention last week's PlayStation Network offerings, I guess: Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Two and PlayStation semi-rarity Castlevania Chronicles. So.

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category: games | forums | eight comments | §

Add to Queue #70: Girl afraid

22 December 08 | 12:20 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #70 | December 23, 2008

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Featured Title: Burn After Reading

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The Coen Brothers follow up the critically acclaimed No Country For Old Men with this very black comedy. The commercials and trailers I saw for this made it look like the "Brad Pitt is dumb and dances crazy" movie, but that doesn't do the film justice. It helps if you're familiar with the Coens, as I really can't think of much to compare this to besides their own work. In many respects, this is a close cousin to The Big Lebowski, as the plot hinges on a a few small coincidences that spiral out of control. In Burn After Reading, however, the results of those coincidences are much darker, and the overall film is much more of an ensemble piece. Also, the characters in Burn are mostly unlikeable: shallow, vain, self-serving, and avaricious, we are mostly freed from feeling sorry for them when their hairball schemes start to go haywire.

I hope I'm not doing this film too great a disservice by comparing it to the The Big Lebowski, as I don't think this film is quite on par with that classic. All the actors seem to be having a great time in Burn -- and unlike Ocean's 12 (where their fun didn't necessarily translate into a good time for the viewer), here's there's a lot of entertainment value in seeing Pitt and George Clooney take their respective idiot personas all the way. Francis McDormand is typically excellent as a fitness instructor oblivious to everything but her desire for plastic surgery, and whose attempts to blackmail a recently-fired intelligence agent with his misplaced memoirs sets the plot in motion. Malkovich is very, uh, Malkovich as said agent: an angry and bitter alcoholic married to Tilda Swinton's ball-busting shrew. She's having an affair with Clooney's character, who in turn uses an internet dating service to meet McDormand's character... and around it goes. All of the great performances are capped by a series of hilarious cameos by JK Simmons. In summary, it's a very good Coen Brothers movie that doesn't quite live up to their very best work -- but it's still very much worth seeing.

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category: film | forums | ten comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part four

21 December 08 | 16:12 | Posted by:

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII | Square Enix | PSP | Action
I gave it: B+ | In retrospect, this was: On the mark.

I was certain, before playing it, that I would hate Crisis Core. It looked like everything I hate about video games: all flash, no substance, with a confusing game mechanic substituting for actual depth. Worse yet, it's basically a Final Fantasy VII fanfiction, and that's one RPG whose welcome has long since worn itself out. Nothing good seems to come from FFVII: the game itself has aged horribly, the annoying characters are a merchandising empire unto themselves, Advent Children was an abomination, Dirge of Cerberus was nearly unplayable...yeah. There was no reason to expect anything short of pure suffering from the game, and in fact I volunteered to do a second-opinion EGM review on the game just to say I'd put in my dues and suffered through something terrible in order to justify getting my name on the list for more quality material.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I ended up really enjoying the game.

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category: games | forums | 20 comments | §

Bionic arms: one size fits all

21 December 08 | 10:26 | Posted by: christopher

I don't think I fully realized it at the time, but Bionic Commando: Rearmed was probably one of the best gaming experiences I had this year.  I never played Bionic Commando on the NES, so I have no idea how it stacks up against the original. Honestly, I might not even have bought it in the first place if not for the combination of a low price point and a release date that coincided exactly with my sudden pangs of desire for classic platforming. Although it was an impulse purchase for me, it turned out to be exactly the right game at the right time. The arm mechanic felt new, the challenge was on par with NES games like Mega Man and Castlevania, and, most surprisingly, the visual polish of the remake did not come at the cost of loose controls. All in all, I was incredibly satisfied with the game, but I hadn't given it much thought since beating it this summer.

Recently, however, I had the chance to play through Bionic Commando: Rearmed with my boyfriend, and I made an amazing discovery. Not only is this a great game for masochists seeking a pleasant abusive 8-bit style challenge, it's also a fantastic casual game. I absolutely did not expect this.  When he was looking through the files on my Playstation 3 and asked what this Bionic Commando thing was, I must admit that I braced myself for disaster. Now, be fair, he's not exactly a non-gamer; one early sign I had that this relationship just might be a good idea was when he saw my copy of Dragon Quest VIII and asked me whether or not I had found the typo in the instruction manual. On the other hand, his attempts at 8-bit style action platforming games like Mega Man, Ninja Gaiden, or Castlevania tend to end up as hilarious exercises in frustration for everyone involved. Suffice to say, I had more than a little trepidation when he started up the game.

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category: games | forums | 18 comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part three

20 December 08 | 16:11 | Posted by:

Professor Layton and the Curious Village | Level-5/Nintendo | DS | Puzzle
I gave it: A- | In retrospect, this was: Spot on, old boy.

Do you remember Professor Layton? Assuming your name isn't Chris Kohler, you probably don't. Like Burnout Paradise, Layton has become one of those cautionary tales about releasing good games at the beginning of the year. Gamers are like goldfish, with a three-month memory for games. If it launched before September, they forget about it by the time the end of the year rolls around. But please don't forget about Professor Layton! We need to pester the crap out of Nintendo to release its sequels.

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category: games | forums | fourteen comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part two

19 December 08 | 15:46 | Posted by:

Just to clarify, my so-called review revue isn't about me second-guessing myself -- it's more like an afterthoughts sort of thing. I stand by the scores I originally handed out, because none of them were wrong. But I might rate some titles a bit differently in retrospect, because reviews are of necessity more reactive than considered. (There are exceptions -- the month-long gap between my playing Metal Gear Solid 4 and publishing the review gave me lots of time to think, and I wouldn't change a word of what I wrote; it's dead-on.)

The nature of reviews is that we usually write down our feelings in the flush of having just experienced the game, and that's perfectly fair: the result is an honest, emotional response to what we've just played, and is likely analogous to what someone reading the review will experience as well. But any work that makes an impression -- be it game, book, movie, or album -- continues to tumble around in our thoughts long after the review is written. We discuss them on forums, chat about them with friends and coworkers, and digest the praise and criticism of others. So no, I'm not second-guessing myself; I'm revisiting a few games and comparing my raw, immediate impressions to how my feelings have changed over time.



No More Heroes | Grasshopper/Ubisoft | Wii | Action
I gave it: B- (I think) | In retrospect, this was: About right.

Satire and deconstruction are tricky things. When done well, they make for insightful, memorable works that can push a medium to a new creative level. When botched, though, they come off as sort of hypocritical. Alas, much as I had high hopes for Suda51's No More Heroes, it tends to be more of the latter than the former.

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category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

Morning commute with Solid Snake

19 December 08 | 10:26 | Posted by: Kat

You might not believe it, but the original Metal Gear Solid makes for a great portable game. I didn't think it would when I got it for my PSP, mostly because there's a lot of talking. And the more talking in a portable game, the less accessible it becomes.

There's something about Metal Gear Solid though. This was Hideo Kojima before he was worshipped as a combination auteur and deity. Back when he still had something to prove. So when you boot MGS up on the train, you soon discover that the philosophical ramblings go quickly, and they're oddly soothing. Of course, in my case, they're also all in Japanese, which means that many of the words simply wash over me. But I don't know that it would be any different in English.

As for the gameplay, every room in Metal Gear Solid poses an individual threat. Make it past the guards in one room, and suddenly you have to deal with a security camera, or maybe a boss. It makes it easy to tackle one room when you're on the train, put the PSP on standby, and pick it up again a little later. Don't ask me why it works. Some games just work well on portable systems, and Metal Gear Solid is one of them.

So far though we've only really seen adaptations and spinoffs on portable systems. Ghost Babel was a great game that hearkened back more to the original MSX episodes than its PlayStation predecessor. Portable Ops and Ac!d both have their fans, from what I've heard. But there's nothing quite like the games that you'll find on the Sony home consoles. I imagine that Kojima believes a game like Metal Gear Solid 4 can't be done on something like the PSP or the Nintendo DS.

I wonder, though. It might be true that the tiny screen of the Nintendo DS and the PSP can no longer contain his awesome artistic genius. But then again, I would love to see the creativity going into something like GTA: Chinatown Wars poured into a portable MGS title instead. I would love to see an MGS that has more in common with its console forebears, but narrows its focus and cuts straight to the chase. Call it the anti-Metal Gear Solid 4. As luck would have it, there is indeed a portable MGS on the way...for the iPhone. And while it certainly looks pretty, it hard to say what it'll be all about. Surely they can't make anything that's all that complex in a system that relies solely on title movement and its touchscreen for input? Well, we'll see. But my spider senses tell me that this is just a side project, and that Kojima is focusing his attentions elsewhere, especially since he's delegating production duties to a first-timer in Yasuyo Watanabe.

So for those yearning for a portable MGS, I guess we'll just have to settling for Portable Ops. A dark prospect for some, I know, but I'm kind of keen to check it out. And, of course, I've still got the first Metal Gear Solid and Japanese Snake. If nothing else, sneaking through Shadow Moses on my morning commute can be a wonderful reminder of hopes that will most likely never come to pass.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

The 2008 review revue, part one

18 December 08 | 12:21 | Posted by:

I have a lot of things happening at work right now, and my personal life is also rather busy. And then I'll be more or less off the grid for a week of Christmas break. So I hope you'll forgive me if I default to a week or two of lame and predictable blogging here. Yes, I'm going to write about the games of 2008, just like every other hack on the planet. Sorry! But this isn't some grand and sweeping best of the year proclamation; instead, I'm going to look at some of the games I've reviewed for work and second-guess myself. Of course, I took a break from reviewing a few months ago, so don't expect to see much of the fall rush. Think of this as a retrospective on the first half of 2008.

Let's begin near the beginning with one of the year's best and most underappreciated games.



Shiren the Wanderer | Sega | DS | RPG/Roguelike
I gave it: B+ | In retrospect, this was: Too low.

Shiren is the sort of game that, by nature, can't seem to get a break. That's because its nature is one of daunting, codified challenge. The roguelike is a sadly misunderstood niche, and while a few good people (like GameSetWatch's John Harris) are fighting the good fight by promoting roguelike awareness, the fact is that most gamers -- especially those with a console heritage -- mistake roguelikes for standard RPGs and are infuriated when they don't work like your typical role-playing adventure. But they don't! And that's the point. A roguelike is entirely about the journey, unlike most RPGs which are about the destination and the tedious grinding necessary to get there. Roguelikes break the level-up mentality; while stat boosts are necessary, a good roguelike prevents you from spending too much time killing monsters for experience, either with hunger (forcing you to seek food at all times lest you starve) or by simply forcing you out of the current dungeon level by more aggressive means. Roguelikes start you out at zero for each journey and challenge you to reach the end with only what you can find. It's basically RPG as arcade game: each playthrough is self-contained, designed to be challenging and not necessarily to be conquered. The point isn't winning so much as learning all the ins and outs and improving your previous performance. Roguelikes can be difficult, often near-impossible, but thoughtful planning and cautious play will eventually see a persistent adventurer through to the end.

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category: games | forums | 30 comments | §

Crafting a persona

17 December 08 | 23:10 | Posted by: lumber_baron

Hey, I'm finished with finals! Now to go play that game where I roleplay a kid...going to school. Huh.

I'm about on the 10th Floor of Tartarus right now, going along at what I suspect is a rather slow pace. I'm playing on the easy setting, and perhaps as a result the battles haven't progressed beyond "Hit dudes and try and exploit a weakness now and then." Battles are moving at a good clip though; I'm appreciative of the "rush" mode they give you. The battle system isn't blowing me away yet, but it's still early.

But what really separates Persona 3 is what happens outside the game's one dungeon, isn't it? JRPGs have a reputation of giving you a fully realized character at the cost of developing a role to your specifications. True, P3 it doesn't exactly have a deep and varied character creation system or anything, but it has a more subtle way of letting you define your character. You're defined by the company you keep.

The term "dating sim" is usually thrown out every time the game comes up, and it's not an wholly inaccurate description. But the game goes beyond that to be a "social sim." I may have only so much control over the plot, but I can define the protagonist's personality by having him be around the people I choose; turns out the main character is a faithful member of the kendo team who hangs out with the old couple who runs the used-book store from time to time. He's dating Yuko because hey, sporty girl in a track suit.

Of course, there's a cache of statistics lying under all of these friendships. If you're committed to playing the game as a game, these relationships are no different than grinding for experience in random encounters. If I want to be as powerful in battle as I can be I have to stop treating these social links as an element of the game's mechanics as opposed to a narrative element. RPG fans probably instantly recognize this relationship system for what it is: a take on stat-building that could be dressed up in any other metaphor. But for someone like me, someone taking in everything at once, I'm intrigued by a game that lets me define my character in such a unique narrative fashion. But like I said, I'm on in easy mode, so I can forego the statistical benefit that playing "out-of-character" would confer.

category: games | forums | ten comments | §

In defense of the easy button

17 December 08 | 17:40 | Posted by: vsrobot

One of the biggest criticisms directed at many recent games is how easy they are. Prince of Persia, Dead Space, and Fable 2 all shipped with built-in game mechanics that make it impossible to get lost. Prince of Persia lets you press a button at any time to have your AI companion summon a glowing ball that will show you the way to get to your goal. In Dead Space, a button press illuminates a line on the floor that points the way to progress. In Fable 2, you can turn on a "breadcrumb trail" that will show you the way to your quest objective. As someone with limited time and a poor sense of direction, I appreciate game design that attempts to make my experience as frustration free as possible.

Others are not so appreciative. In reviews and on popular internet gaming forums, these mechanics have been called "hand-holding" -- or worse, "an excuse for poor level design." The latter complaint particularly grates, as it could end up being truer than I'd like. As of right now, you could easily play any of those games and never take advantage of the "easy button"...but at the same time, I could easily see these mechanics taking the place of playtesting and fine-tuning level design. Halo 3 was famously play-tested to an extreme to make sure that players were able to figure out which way to go in order to proceed. Charts, graphs, and hundreds of hours of play-time were invested into making sure that players would not get lost. If Master Chief had the ability to summon a glowing line that pointed him to his next objective, would Bungie have taken the time to polish the levels to that extent?

I'm willing to take the chance that something ephemeral might be lost if the trade-off is a game where I'm never stuck for hours not knowing where to go or what to do. I understand that some gamers find enjoyment in the things that frustrate me. I'm not looking for an unbeatable challenge I can devote my life to -- I just want to enjoy a game. I don't see why gamers into extreme difficulty and gamers for whom challenge isn't the point can't cohabit. These "easy buttons" are just that: buttons. They only activate upon a player input. The existence of that option doesn't mean you have to take advantage of it if it makes the game less fun for you. Shoot-em-up fans seem to be able to enjoy games which let you choose how many lives you start with, and those games are notorious for being brutally challenging. I'm not a big follower of the genre, but it seems to me that some of the most popular shooters have an infinite lives option -- something hardcore fans make use of. Maybe it's time for the rest of us to get used to games giving us more options to tailor difficulty besides easy/medium/hard. As the gaming audience becomes more inclusive, I can easily see game design incorporating things like breadcrumb trails, the player tailoring seen in Tomb Raider Underworld (which gives you sliders that adjust the difficulty of the combat and platforming, as well as the ammo carried, independently of each other) and other options that mean the experiences players have with the same game is wildly divergent and keyed to their tastes.

category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

There and back again... to my PC

17 December 08 | 10:35 | Posted by: Kat

As much as I enjoy Japanese RPGs and portable games, people who know me best will tell you that, deep down, I'm most comfortable in front of a PC. Part of it is my temperment -- I like slow-paced games that require a lot of thinking, and PCs have always been great for that. The rest is simple bad luck. As a child, the PC was my fallback measure in the face of the fact that I simply was not going to get any consoles from my parents. Not a one.

But even though I finally got a Super Nintendo about ten years ago (and a PlayStation not long after that), I've never quite left my PC. When it comes to things like the Xbox 360, I'm the very definition of late to the party. But when I upgraded my laptop earlier this year, I felt like a kid at Christmas. I could finally play all those games that I had been missing over the years because my PC was too old, too slow, too low on memory... pretty much every problem you would ever attribute to a PC. I could finally play Sins of a Solar Empire, BioShock, Company of Heroes, even Half-Life 2. And when I did, it felt great to exchange my controller for a mouse and keyboard.

Obviously, not everyone feels the same way, but I suppose that a lot of it has to do with what we grew up playing. We've all probably played at least a few PC games, I just happened to spend the great majority of my adolescence playing X-Wing vs. TIE Fighter, StarCraft, Rebellion, and pretty much any other sci-fi oriented PC game that I could get my hands on. When I finally got my hands on a console following years of holiday disappointment, it had been so long that I was honestly shocked when I played Metal Gear Solid and Final Fantasy VII. Somewhere along the line, I guess I had managed to convince myself that all console games played exactly the same -- fast and fun, but ultimately brainless as well. Yeah, I know, I was one of those, whatever "those" entails for you.

I've spent most of my time on consoles since then, but I've always been happy to come back and spend some quality time my PC. Of course, times have changed since 1998, and consoles today have taken on quite a few PC-like characteristics themselves. But PC gaming is evolving too, and I don't imagine that it'll be long before people suddenly wake up and realize that browser-based shooters and free MMOs are the single biggest thing going at the moment besides Wii Fit. And really, if I were just some kid who never seemed to get an Xbox 360 for Christmas, I would be right there with them. You compensate any way you can.

But even though I'm not 14 anymore, and I'm more than capable of shelling out the cash for a new console, I kind of feel like I've come full circle. I play a lot of handheld games, but hey, I played a lot of Game Boy back in the day too. And if I ever get the itch to try out that next-gen game that everybody's raving about? Well, I can always pick it up from Steam. Otherwise, I've got me some Sins of a Solar Empire and Shin Megami Tensei Online to play. Or maybe even a Korean MMO. You know, the possibilities are just endless.

category: games | forums | three comments | §

New Game Plus: Designated downloads for 12/16/08

16 December 08 | 17:10 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

PSN folks didn't get much last week — just PowerUp Forever, which also hit XBLA last week. But if you're new to the Resistance series you'll be glad to know that all the previous map packs for the original game are now available free of charge. And if you paid for them in the past, well. Sorry, sucker! Good things come to those who wait!

Oh, and for anyone who has Mercenaries 2: There's some new free DLC for you, but it's only gratis until the end of the year.

As for the rest of the DLC this week, well, see for yourself.

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category: games | forums | four comments | §

New Games Plus: Looking back

16 December 08 | 09:54 | Posted by: reibeatall

Well, it's done. After last week, the holiday blitz of fantastic games is finally over. Sure, there are a few games releasing this week, but they're nothing that great. Instead of spending paragraphs talking about how horrible I think Rise of the Argonauts will be, or how Rock Band 2 is finally being released on the Wii and PS2, I'd rather focus on the good times that the past few months have given me.

• Gears of War 2 was everything I wanted it to be: an over-the-top action game with an overbearingly stupid story. It was visceral and it was glorious. When I wasn't yelling at some of the stupid choices made in the game (Act 4 was kinda brutal), I was just enjoying my time, happy not to have to think too hard to enjoy my entertainment.
  
• Valkyria Chronicles, on the other hand, was everything I didn't know I was missing. I knew that I'd like it by virtue of its pedigree, but I didn't realize that it was the best tactical rpg to come out since Final Fantasy Tactics. The characters were memorable, the battles required strategy, and the game looked simply gorgeous.
  
• Rock Band 2 is to Rock Band as Guitar Hero 2 is to Guitar Hero: a refinement of an amazing game, bringing it to near-perfection. Ask any drunken partygoer and they'll all agree: No-Fail Mode is the best addition.
  
• Mirror's Edge was a game that, uh...well, what can I say? I had a blast playing it, and there's something ultimately rewarding about hitting a long series of jumps/slides/grabs without breaking your momentum, but I just couldn't spend too much time with it at once. I think I stopped playing around level five; at that point, I realized that I was done, and everything I'd wanted to do in the game had already been thrown at me. I don't think I'll ever pick it back up, but that doesn't mean I hate it.
  
• Castlevania: Judgment isn't as bad as everybody thinks it is, but if you're a fighting game fan or a Castlevania fan, you'll probably be disappointed. Given that it's a Castlevania fighting game, this begs the question of who is left to play it.
  
• Left 4 Dead is by far the most fun game to have come out this year. Once you get a group of four or eight people together, the good times come a-rollin'. I haven't laughed (and cursed) so rapidly since the Talking Tyrants first started doing Halo Sundays. It even got my girlfriend to start playing first-person shooters, something I never imagined would happen.
  
• Chrono Trigger DS is Chrono Trigger. It simply fills me with glee.

All in all, it's been a pretty damn good year-end for games. What about you guys? What games did you end up playing and what did you think about them? And yes, I'm sure I forgot [your favorite game here], but that's only because it sucks and you have bad taste.

category: games | forums | 25 comments | §

Add to Queue 69: Critical hit

15 December 08 | 22:29 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #69 | December 16, 2008

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Featured Titles: The Criterion Collection on Blu-ray

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While my usual modus operandi here is to lavish praise on a specific movie, this time I'm lavishing praise on an entire company: Criterion. Cinephiles already are well aware of The Criterion Collection, which is well-regarded due to its selection, the care taken in the course of transferring the movies to video, and the comprehensive extras included with each release. A film enthusiast could do a lot worse than just watch every movie Criterion releases -- and you'd get a better curriculum than what is offered in most film studies courses in the process. If you've ever enjoyed an audio commentary track on a laserdisc, DVD, or BD, you can thank Criterion for that; their release of the 1931 King Kong was, according to Wikipedia, the first home video release to include that feature. Criterion also deserves a lot of credit for their pioneering work in the letterbox format. It might seem hard to believe for some of my younger readers, but there was a time when it was impossible to get a home video version of a movie in its original intended aspect ratio. It'd be like if the only prints available of the Mona Lisa had 33% of the painting cut off of the top and bottom to fit the frame size popular at the time, or every album on CD was missing a third of the tracks that appeared on vinyl. (Of course, if you're old enough to remember vinyl-first releases, you probably remember standardized pan-and-scan.)

Now at long last, Criterion is starting to release some of its catalog in high definition. After seeing what the company was able to accomplish on DVD, I'm really excited to see where Blu-ray takes them. Their first four releases include a couple of my personal favorites: The Third Man is from Orson Welles at the height of his prowess; Bottle Rocket marks the beginning of Wes Anderson's feature career; The Man Who Fell To Earth is a visually striking science fiction film starring David Bowie; and Chungking Express comes from the highly regarded Chinese director Wong Kar-wai. All of these movies are worth a look.

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category: film | forums | ten comments | §

GameSpite Issue 12.2: Wherefore Art?

15 December 08 | 10:07 | Posted by:

Fun archaic English trivia: did you know that 'wherefore" means "why," not "where"? Probably you did, because you read GameSpite and are therefore possessed of a keen and piercing intellect! But please do not walk around saying things like, "Wherefore did I put my car keys?" because that would make you sound like a silly person indeed. Shakespearean-era people would seriously be laughing at you.

Meanwhile, in answer to the question posed by the title of this entry...well, wherefore not?

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Braid
The conversation surrounding the game Braid has probably garnered more press time and discussion than the game itself. Alas, author legeek has avoided this obvious trap, so you will have to settle for a critique of Braid rather than an another screed on whether or not games can be art (and whether or not the posturing of a game's creator can undermine the merits of said game).

Mole Mania
You know how I used to do comic-style reviews on occasion? Well, Loki (of Nintendo Super Squad fame) just laughed and said, "Was it comics? I will show you how!" before unleashing a torrent of awesome upon the world. In the process, he also gave a pretty good critique of an obscure Game Boy puzzler. Rad.

Streets of Rage
And finally, at the other extreme of all this artsiness is a simple, straightforward tribute to the game that perfected one of the simplest and most straightforward genres ever: the king of beat-em-ups, Streets of Rage.

category: comic, games | forums | 21 comments | §

Almost a success testimonial

14 December 08 | 11:17 | Posted by:

Nintendo would be happy to know that I am a Wii Fit success testimonial. Since the game launched, I've dropped probably 15-20 pounds and lost nearly two inches around my waist. At this rate, I'll be back to the point of feeling pretty OK with my appearance and fitness level in no time at all. Well done, Nintendo.



Admittedly, they'd be a lot less happy to learn that I've never used Wii Fit beyond trade show demos. I don't own the game ("game") and doubt I ever will.

Still, I do credit it with my weight loss efforts. I thought long and hard about picking up Wii Fit back at launch before realizing it would turn out to be another empty half-effort toward slimming up. And hey, I thought, why drop $90 on a plastic board when I have a disused exercise bike that I can start using for free? An exercise bike that will actually provide aerobic exercise to help me burn fat? And so I began a long-term routine of nightly 40-minute workouts. So far, it's been a great success.

That would make a great slogan for the game, really. "Wii Fit: Inspiring people to seek out real fitness solutions." Man, Nintendo should pay me for this stuff.

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Book update: I've just learned that the printer won't actually be shipping the books to me until the day after Christmas. Sorry, everyone; I think the size of the order combined with the time of year did us in. Also, just to restate: the first printing of the books is completely sold out or spoken for; any copies ordered as of a few days ago probably won't show up until February or so.

category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

Persona-ly speaking

13 December 08 | 18:02 | Posted by: lumber_baron

I've played two RPGs in my life: Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door and Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga. Besides the fact that each game bends over backwards at a 270° angle to subvert normal RPG battle mechanics, you may have noticed another subtle similarity between the two games. A certain, shall we say, thematic element that runs through both games.

My excuse is my console history during my formative years, which looks like this: Genesis → Nintendo 64 → GameCube. You tell me where I was supposed to develop a love for RPGs in there. Without Nintendo Power and Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy VII's hype to convince me that I really really wanted to select "Attack" from a menu, I sailed through my video game life blissfully unaware of the joys of min/maxing and grinding. I never even actually bought Paper Mario and Mario and Luigi either; I borrowed them from friends and family members. I did buy Chrono Trigger for the PlayStation this last summer, all the while vaguely cognizant of the fact that there was something people didn't like about this particular port. Then I got home, noticed the loading times before battles, and haven't returned to it since.

It all adds up to modern man who's never been interested in RPGs. You might find that lamentable, but I don't think you can say it's all that unreasonable. I figure most RPG fans were introduced to the genre when they were impressionable youths, and took the play system for granted. Growing up with the mechanics and conventions in mind, they simply never gave them much of a second though. But for myself, who had a fully formed concept of what a video game should be, I balked when an RPG was placed in front of me for the first time. "You mean I just stand there while the enemy attacks? I just sort of hope that I dodge it? Really?"

I probably sound awfully dismissive about an entire genre that I admittedly have little experience with. I certainly don't think that RPGs are bad games, and am even open to the possibility that I'd like them if given the opportunity, but I don't even get to play all the games that I'd like to play let alone have the money or time to experiment with genres that never caught my fancy.

Enter Festivus, where my haul this year included cult favorite and forum institution Persona 3. On some level this a kindly, face-saving gesture by my gifter, as P3 is expected to appear in the background of all Festivus pictures. On the other hand, it's a perfect excuse to give the genre a try. True, I'll be without a PS2 for the Winter Break, but I'm gonna give it a shot between bouts of studying for finals. We'll see how it goes.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

A whole new world

12 December 08 | 22:26 | Posted by: calorie_mate

As reviews of the new Prince of Persia started coming in, word on the street was that the game was "too easy". I feared the worst; after all, utter lack of difficulty was one of the only complaints I could lob at Wind Waker, and this sounded similar. After spending a bit of time with it over the weekend, however, I was happy to discover that "too easy" isn’t exactly accurate.

When you miss a jump in the new Prince of Persia game, your lovely assistant / Yorda clone Elika leaps to the rescue and throws you back to the last bit of solid ground you stood on. You literally cannot jump to your death. Similarly, if you’re defeated in battle, she’ll save you before the final blow is struck, essentially resetting the battle and restoring the enemy’s health. In conclusion: you literally can’t die. Ever.

The point Ubisoft Montreal is trying to make, though, is an important one: why should you die? "Death" in a videogame simply means reloading from the last checkpoint anyway. Granted, it’s less frustrating today than the 5+ minutes reloading could take in the PS1 era, but Prince of Persia’s system essentially has you back in control faster than even Super Mario Bros. did, and that’s damn impressive. All the same things -- the platforming, restarting the fight with whatever monster beat you -- have to happen again, but without the waiting and frustration usually associated with failure. The game is all about positive reinforcement and relieving the player from that stress.

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category: games | forums | 18 comments | §

We're not done talking about Dragon Quest just yet

12 December 08 | 14:17 | Posted by:

Do you know why Dragon Quest V is awesome? Yes, yes, it's got heart and all that stuff. But more importantly, because my combat roster now includes a Slime.



A Slime wearing boxer shorts as armor.

Even better: since scanning this picture, she's also donned a top hat as a helmet.

category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

Can you feel the tension? More like super high tension!

12 December 08 | 11:38 | Posted by: m_nicolai

We're talking about Dragon Quest X already!? Dragon Quest IX is probably a year away from a North American release, and the carefully rationed trickle of new screens for that game has made the anticipation almost unbearable. With another three and a half months to go until it's Japanese release and Famitsu's... let's say "efficient" use of the same dozen screenshots, it seems like the wait has only just begun. Fortunately there were some nuggets of information revealed during this week's impromptu Dragon Quest X announcement. A date (March 28th) and price (5,980 yen! Cheap!) and a demonstration of the game's multiplayer mode by Yuji Horii, which is the real reason I'm so excited. Not the Horii part, although his balding head and long, stringy bangs look, uh, precious. No, It's the multiplayer that I find so intriguing.

I've been introducing my wife to the DQ series with the Dragon Quest IV remake. We're sharing a copy and playing in tandem, swapping the cart with every hour or two of game time to keep from getting too far ahead of one another as well as sharing tips and strategies. It's like our own private Fun Club, except we can't really play together. Most of the games we share have a prominent multiplayer element, and to be honest, my expectations for DQIX are probably unreasonable considering how little information is known. But when I'm not playing DQIV I've been curling up with Dragon Warrior III for the Game Boy Color, and I know this much: generic characters in a DQ game are awesome.

And I can't deny the twinge of disappointment I felt when I heard the series would be headed for the Wii. I love my Wii, but I don't get to see it very often. When I'm in front of a TV, it means I'm watching something with my family, so most of my gaming is now done on handhelds. I'm not complaining exactly -- it's encouraging to see a huge franchise like this embrace gameplay over graphics. But my dream of a video game industry that caters exclusively to me has been shattered, like a brick going through a window. Fortunately, the brick is made of delicious chocolate.

P.S. Have you seen the Japanese Dragon Quest hub site? It's the first website I've ever wanted to live inside of.

category: games | forums | four comments | §

For your consideration

11 December 08 | 21:41 | Posted by: vsrobot

Since around now is the time when games writers and industry watchers begin formulating their "top x of 2008" lists, it's the perfect occasion to remind everyone of one of the year's best games -- one that might be forgotten because of its early release date: Burnout Paradise.. Released in January to strong reviews, Paradise offered racing fans a huge open world to race in. The technical achievement of having a giant city to race in with zero loading was marred only by some complaints that the game lacked a "retry" option after losing a race. However, since literally every street corner in the game offers something to do, I didn't find that to be a serious flaw.

Beside the standard races, Paradise also offers a wide variety of events. Long-time Burnout fans lamented the lack of a crash mode -- something I also miss -- but there's still plenty to do. In addition to the arcade racing available in the single player mode, Paradise offers an incredibly smooth online experience. With just a few taps of the D-pad, you can be racing against other people online.

As if the best arcade-style racing franchise's leap to the current generation with a huge open world and a progressive online experience weren't enough, the developers at Criterion supported the game well after its launch with multiple free content packs. In an era in which Need For Speed offers gamers the chance to spend real money to unlock cars they'd earn anyway in the course of progressing through the game, Criterion added new cars, a new UI, new multiplayer modes, and most significantly, the first motorcycles in the Burnout franchise...and all of it was completely free.

Of course, I doubt they did it out of the goodness of their hearts. Paradise was a game that stayed relevant throughout the entire year, and managed to get a lot of press long after most games have been forgotten. Whereas most games get all of their consumer impressions within a short launch window and then fall off the face of the internet, Paradise remained frequently discussed by the gaming press and community. New gamers were jumping into Burnout all throughout the year, and people who already owned Paradise held onto it. Why sell a game when you know you're going to get new things to do in it for free? (The full, budget-priced DLC version of the game that arrived half a year later probably didn't hurt, either.)

I'm not saying that Burnout Paradise merits consideration for inclusion in year-end best game wrap-ups because of its experimental marketing, but rather because the upshot of all that was a great experience for the end user. At launch, Paradise was a fantastic arcade-style racing game that would make it onto my list even if it hadn't given me so much more afterwords. They did give me all that stuff, though, and I kept going back to it. I don't think Burnout Paradise is the game of the year -- not in a year which includes LittleBigPlanet and Mirror's Edge and other exemplary experiences -- but it deserves to be in the conversation.

category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

The books have been ordered

11 December 08 | 11:15 | Posted by:

And, somehow, they've ended up being a barely break-even proposition for me. After I ship them out, I'm probably going to end up losing a little cash. Not quite sure how that happened, but I'll need to rethink my approach to future volumes so they're not quite so financially tenuous. In retrospect, I probably should have just had the publisher do direct mailings to buyers, but I had this silly notion of a personal touch or some such.

Anyway, it looks like they won't quite make Christmas despite my best efforts; apparently the publisher prints large quantities more slowly than single books. So that's annoying. But at least I have New Year's plans now!

Also, I wrote a follow-up to yesterday's post over at 1UP. Brace yourself for pure crotchetiness! Also, I found out yesterday that my title has been transmuted from -- I believe -- "Senior Editor, Expanded Content" to "Executive Editor, Blogs." So I guess you can expect a lot more of this sort of thing, among others.

category: gamespite | forums | 23 comments | §

Is it Christmas already?

10 December 08 | 22:23 | Posted by:

Apparently so! My proof of GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 arrived today. The cover's a little screwed up, so I'm tweaking it tonight and placing the big order tomorrow. Hopefully the printed copies will be to me in time to go out before Christmas. Cross your fingers and stuff. Because besides the cover, it's completely friggin' awesome.

WOO YEAH ALRIGHT

category: gamespite | forums | 18 comments | §

Japan's happy little rut

10 December 08 | 17:12 | Posted by: Kat

I've been wondering for a while which way Japanese developers are going to jump in terms of his generation's console race. Once upon a time, it was a foregone conclusion that the bulk of JRPGs would end up the PS3, and so would go my gaming dollar. But Sony hasn't exactly done a good job of gaining traction, and Microsoft has done a good job of throwing money at publishers like Square-Enix, so I've been reluctant to commit either way.

And really, so have Japanese developers. Developing for the PS3 and Xbox 360 is still prohibitively expensive, and Japan has been generally slow to embrace HDTV and online multiplayer on consoles. So they've been biding their time with the PS2, Nintendo DS and PSP, hoping that Square-Enix will show them where to go. And now that Dragon Quest X has been announced for the Wii, I can almost hear the collective sigh of relieve in studios throughout Japan. They got the answer they wanted to hear.

And why not? The Wii has a huge install base, and developing for it is fairly cheap. It'll buy developers a few more years to figure out how they're going to get their act together and start developing for more powerful consoles. Until then, we'll get Wii Monster Hunter, Wii Dragon Quest, and pretty much every shade of JRPG and licensed anime shovelware that developers can churn out in a two year period. It'll be like PS2 2.0, except with a vestigial motion controller. And beyond that, they'll be just fine with developing for the DS and the PSP for another year or two.

Personally, I'm not really surprised or upset by this. I like my Wii, PSP and DS just fine. But I do think that making a beeline for the Wii will only contribute to the notion out west that the Japanese development community is falling behind. That is, unless they decide to do something revolutionary with the motion controller. Personally, I wouldn't bet on it.

So for all of you who were waiting for, say, Shin Megami Tensei on the PlayStation 3, I'm pretty sure you're going to have to keep waiting. Unless their name is Capcom, Namco-Bandai or Square Enix, Japanese developers will be perfectly happy to toil away in their little rut until Square once again deigns to point the way for them. Say... around 2011. Just in time for Final Fantasy XIII.

category: games | forums | 26 comments | §

Retronauts 61, and why 4 means death in Japanese

10 December 08 | 11:51 | Posted by:

This week's Retronauts -- episode 61, which is about 51 more than I actually ever figured we'd ever record -- tackles the Persona series. I am a diligent RPG enthusiast and have purchased every Persona (and Shin Megami Tensei) title released in the U.S. to date, but such are the restrictions on my time that I've only ever dabbled in them. And these are not games in which one can really dabble; much like a baby or a sickly kitten, they require full and constant attention.

But I am storing them away for retirement. I'm gonna be the demon-summoning-est dude in the old folks home, just you wait.

The one part of the podcast that's most stuck with me has been a listener-submitted letter that praises Persona 3 as a fantastic example of what can be done with a game on a limited budget. Because P3 had a much lower budget than something like Kingdom Hearts, the reasoning goes, it was far more creative than your typical blockbuster title. Since the team couldn't afford to create a massive world with a vast cast of characters, they stuck to a very small and limited environment and developed their few characters with unprecedented depth, creating something with very little flash but plenty of substance.

I absolutely agree with this line of thought, and in fact it crystallizes perfect in light of recent news. Last week's Metal Gear Solid 5 (maybe) teaser, for one; and then there was last night's news that Dragon Quest X will be making its way to Wii, of all things. One of these tibits fills me with interest, the other with weary resignation. The funny thing is that the roles are swapped from what they were a year ago; if these new items had popped up last December, I would have said, "Yeah! More Metal Gear! And, eh, Dragon Quest keeps stagnating. Whatever." Now, it's the Metal Gear sequel that reeks of creative bankruptcy and the Dragon Quest plans that make me curious to see what lies in store.



And here's why: 2008 was the year I stopped caring about AAA releases. They're the grease that keeps the wheels of my job spinning, I realize; if it weren't for the hype around Gears of War and the frothing fanboy brain seizures prompted by any mention of Killzone 2, I'd probably be out of work. But god, I'm so sick of vapid big-budget games. I guess they're a sign that the games industry has finally achieved its goal of catching up with Hollywood, because most blockbuster game releases feel as mentally empty and emotionally void as your typical $200-million-budget-Don-LaFontaine-would-have-narrated-the-trailer-when-he-was-alive film. So well done, games industry. You've realized your dream at last. Too bad it wasn't the right dream. Games aren't movies, and the horrors of Siliwood should have proven that...yet the biggest and most visible games still use "Hollywood summer hit" as their model. Sometime around June, I finally got sick of it.

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category: games | forums | 32 comments | §

New Game Plus 12/9: Farewell my concub--er, PS2

09 December 08 | 20:54 | Posted by: reibeatall

This is it, guys. The end of an era. The last PlayStation 2 game worth a damn is hitting stores today, and with it ends a decade of media dominance. At least it's going out with a bang, right? A bang to the head, even! The followup to last year's (and also this year's, kinda) Persona 3 -- aptly entitled Persona 4 -- has arrived. After this, you can just about stop looking for anything good to come out on the PS2. (Unless of course Atlus USA decides to grace us with the final MegaTen game, Kuzunoha Raidou 2.)

It's strange looking back on the history of the highest-selling console ever. From its botched launch where shipments were cut in half the day before release and a meagre handful of excellent launch software like Fantavision and laser-lens failures aplenty, all the way until today, where the PS2 has sold some retarded number like 140 million units worldwide. Seriously, guys, that's a helluva lot of consoles that have been moved, and that doesn't even take into account how many consumers picked up systems secondhand. Sony has bulit an empire with the PlayStation 2 that surpasses even its predecessor by 40 million units. Touting full backwards compatibility with all the PSone games certainly helped sales; customers didn't have to feel like they were making their current possessions obsolete.

Nothing could stop the beast that is the PlayStation 2 -- not even the PlayStation 3. For its first year and a half of the PS3's life, the PS2 was consistently outselling its successor month-in and month-out. It's name that is now synonomous with console gaming. Twelve years ago, everything was a Nintendo to my grandma; now everything's a PlayStation, and with good reason. The PS2 was home to literally thousands of games, and there were a lot of good ones. Ratchet and Clank, Jak and Daxter, God of War, Disgaea, Metal Gear Solid 2 (and of course 3), Final Fantasy X and XII, The Bouncer (shut up guys this game is great), Devil May Cry, Raw Danger....the list goes on and on. Of course, there were some games that were complete garbage, but we won't stoop so low that we talk about those.

But enough about an old person's console, let's talk about the new games coming out.

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category: games | forums | 40 comments | §

Steal this Spore

09 December 08 | 16:29 | Posted by: lumber_baron

According to some dudes who are all into BitTorrent, Spore was the single most pirated game of the year. You know Spore, that game with all those DRM thingies that people didn't like and which were meant to discourage, um, piracy. Well.

Some will probably point to this as evidence that oppressive DRM only encourages piracy, but I think it's just a indicator of the game's success. I can't find overall sales results for PC games this year, but I can't imagine they're much different than the list of the top ten most pirated games.

It does however, go to show just how little publishers can really do when it comes to preventing people from stealing their games. It's a sad fact for PC publishers in particular, but that's how things are. Console publishers are experimenting with selling games that require peripherals that they themselves are selling, and everyone's selling special editions to cajole people into buying physical copies. PC publishers have something of a trump card in MMOs and other games that require a subscription service, but with World of Warcraft ruling the nest and the perception that PC games consist of an ever-shrinking stable of genres, it's not exactly a panacea. Hopefully the (frankly unscientific and biased) results of this study will at least serve as a warning for publishers not to retreat further into their DRM bunker.

category: games | forums | five comments | §

New Game Plus: Designated downloads for 12/09/08

09 December 08 | 11:16 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

WiiWare has officially taken XBLA's place as the clearing house for DLC crap -- not that everything to appear on Microsoft's service is cast in gold these days, either. Honestly, who buys some of this stuff? It's garbage, worthy only of scorn. So scorn it shall receive! The very scorn I once reserved for Sony's policy of releasing DLC on the PlayStation Network at a drunken, lame snail's pace. I'm sorry, Sony. I realize now that there's something to be said for quality control.

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category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

Missing the point at 8-bit Cafe

09 December 08 | 05:06 | Posted by: Kat

I struck another item off my list of "things to do before I leave Japan" last week. With less than a month to go before I catch a plane headed for home, I finally decided to make the time to check out the 8-Bit Cafe in Shinjuku with a few friends.

Of course, getting there meant navigating Shinjuku, the very definition of inpenetrable concrete jungle, where almost anything worthwhile is tucked away on the fourth floor of some building you've never heard of. Case in point, the 8-bit is on the 5th floor of the Shinjuku Q Building, which looks like pretty much every Shinjuku building ever. Thankfully, God had the foresight to invent Google Maps, which made the going considerably easier. I found the place without a hitch, and walked in to find this:

Sorry about the lighting. As I've said before, my cell phone camera is awful. In case you're wondering, those two shadowy objects are a Famicom and the original Mobile Suit Gundam's Big Zam. Looking around, I also saw the Zeta Gundam peering out from a display case, and Char playing patron saint over the bar. What can I say, I know that I'm missing the point, but I notice this stuff. But in case you were wondering, there was a lot of nifty gaming memorabilia too. Unfortunately, the only thing that sticks out in my mind is a huge hunk of plastic purporting to be a portable gaming system. I wish I had gotten a picture, because none of us recognized it. And the thing was like a brick too.

Sadly, we didn't make it to the Famicom/Super Famicom duo set up in the corner either, which probably means that we missed the point of going to 8-Bit in the first place. But as we walked out, I couldn't help noticing that Mother was sitting on top of the pile. I've gotta know, is there anybody out there who would really hole up in a bar and play a 10-hour RPG? Who has the patience for that kind of thing? Actually, what am I talking about? This a retro gaming bar. Of course somebody beat Mother while on the premises. They wouldn't have been able to stop themselves.

For our part, we ended up passing a pleasant evening over drinks, occasionally pausing to oggle the memorabilia. It was small, but it seemed like a mansion compared to 16 Shots, which felt like a closet. It had more memorabilia too. We only ended up staying for a couple hours, but now that I know the way, I think I might return before heading back to the States. I like the atmosphere, and besides, I still have to beat Mother.

category: games | forums | seven comments | §

Add to Queue #68: My parents are dead

08 December 08 | 20:56 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #68 | December 9, 2008

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Featured Title: The Dark Knight

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The movie so good it made me mad. It upsets me that my favorite Batman movie isn't directed by Tim Burton. It upsets me that my favorite comic-book turned movie-hero isn't Hellboy. I feel like I'm cheating on Tim Burton, Mike Mignola, and Guillermo del Toro saying this, but The Dark Knight is by far the best comic book movie ever made -- perhaps one of the best movies ever made. Ever since The Dark Knight's release, I have been comparing every film I see to it, and none measure up.

As the film begins, we have a Batman who longs for a normal life, if only he could complete or pass on the Sisyphean task of being Gotham City's protector. Unfortunately for Batman, it seems that his extraordinary crime-fighting techniques have prompted normal criminals to rely even more heavily on corrupt cops and byzantine financial loopholes to protect their ill-gotten gains; punching faces alone can't solve that sort of dilemma. His iconic status has attracted not only vigilante wannabes who put their lives in danger trying to emulate him, but a new criminal, one attracted to the sport Batman represents, one for whom chaos and anarchy aren't a byproduct or crime or a means to an end but rather the whole point in and of itself. Batman has allies both old (honest cop Jim Gordon and Wayne's childhood love turned DA's office lawyer, Rachel Dawes) and new (Harvey Dent, the new DA). But this new criminal, this Joker, preys on the insecurities and foibles of the whole system. He doesn't care about money. His "plan" seems to be to set impossible moral decisions in front of Batman and his allies and then watch as the tragedies that result from those decisions tear our heroes apart.

Why is The Dark Knight so good? The direction is superb. The cinematography is gorgeous. The action set-pieces are thrilling and exhilarating. The actors give uniformly excellent performances, from Morgan Freeman and Gary Oldman in supporting roles to the stars Christian Bale, Aaron Eckhart, and above all, Heath Ledger. The plot is dense but moves swiftly. It feels more like an epic crime drama than a superhero fantasy; it has more in common with Heat than it does with Superman Returns. It is a brilliant, transformitive work -- one whose reverberations will be felt for a long time to come.

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category: film | forums | 40 comments | §

GameSpite Issue 12.1: The portable addictions episode

08 December 08 | 06:11 | Posted by:

Spite, love, whatever -- who cares about such base emotions? This latest issue of GameSpite is all about random nonsense rather than the forced themes of the past few updates. And yet, we still ended up with a sort of theme anyway: totally epic and fantastic portable games. Actually, I guess that's not really much of a theme so much as a mild coincidence. Eh, never mind, then.

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Astro Boy: Omega Factor
Treasure games and I have an uneasy relationship, in that I recognize their excellence but don't really particularly enjoy them, and they promise not to hit me again if I don't try to play them. That being said, the amount of love and goodness described in this article and its companion makes me realize that some things transcend mere enjoyment.

Pokémon
Pokémon is the woody wagon of video games: it's uncool, everyone makes fun of it, but gosh dang if it doesn't get the kids to school safely. No, wait, that's nonsense. Sorry. But this article isn't! So you should read it, ayup.

category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

The greatest thing ever

07 December 08 | 21:57 | Posted by:

They're making a 1/6 scale Golgo 13 action figure with a briefcase containing a disassembled custom M-16? And it's $200? Man, that's nothing. I can totally sell a kidney for way more than that.

category: toys | forums | fifteen comments | §

Nerd rage of the heavenly bride

07 December 08 | 16:49 | Posted by:

Square sent along a preview ROM of the English version of Dragon Quest V a couple of days ago. This is very exciting! It's the first legitimate English version of one of Japan's most revered games ever, so of course it's interesting to see how it shapes up. But I have to admit my love of schadenfreude is most excited about seeing the inevitable meltdown that'll result from some of the more unexpected localization choices. People do take their video game character names awfully seriously these days.

category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

Kept you waiting, huh?

05 December 08 | 21:14 | Posted by: calorie_mate

So...another Metal Gear teaser, huh? Well, that’s nice. Unfortunately, I pretty much completely agree with everything Parish said below. I had a lot of issues with Metal Gear Solid 4, and it’s probably best to let the series stay finished rather than trying to squeeze anymore out of it and make things worse.

Strangely enough, though, the announcement has made me realize that I miss playing MGS4. It’s no secret I was a die hard fan up until the last game, and I really feel like the overhauled control scheme finally nailed what tactical espionage action should be. Choking, stunning, stabbing, and shooting were all intuitive and satisfying. Furthermore, the "being a super spy while two factions duke it out" dynamic of the first two chapters was an interesting concept that could definitely be further explored – kids these days love moral choices, so why not make a compelling reason to side with either faction? The fact of the matter is, for all the vitriol I’ve spewed at the game, and in spite of the numerous ways it let me down, I realize now that MGS4 could still fun. If things had been (very) different, I would be more than happy to play it over and over. I know, I’m stunned, too.

It’s a shame, then, that my choice will likely end up being either "more Metal Gear, when they shouldn’t" or "no other game like it". The thing I like best about, say, Zelda is the environmental puzzle solving, and I can get a enjoyable (if not perfectly similar) substitute from games like Ico, Prince of Persia, and Braid. Every other attempt at stealth gameplay, though, has either been a mediocre failure, or lacked the nothing-is-sacred mantra of Metal Gear and attached a forgettable international spy plot (I’m looking at you, Splinter Cell). I don't think it's impossible for someone else to do it, but I have my doubts.

In a perfect world, Konami would wise up and use MGS4’s engine and gameplay to do something completely new. Really, this would solve their biggest dilemma, too: how to do a Metal Gear-caliber game without Kojima. Write a brand-spankin’ new plot, use the expensive assets you’ve already developed, and make me care again. I want to play with what MGS4 offers, but without -- as mentioned before -- 20 years of plot bogging it down. Of course, as also mentioned before, this will never, ever happen for a simple reason: money. Why try milking an unfamiliar new franchise when there’s still plenty left in MGS’ proverbial teats?

category: comic | forums | fourteen comments | §

A next Metal Gear is....

05 December 08 | 11:02 | Posted by:

...completely unnecessary, to be honest. Does the cryptic new Metal Gear teaser mean the series is coming to Xbox 360? iPhone? Wii? The Internet is abuzz! But they seem to be overlooking the more important question: why even bother making "a next Metal Gear" to begin with?



The obvious answer is "to make money," which is sort of a given. But for the first time since I played the original Metal Gear on NES, I'm not at all looking forward to seeing another iteration of the series, because anything more in the saga would be pretty much pointless. And I mean "since the original MG" literally; I remember sitting around in algebra class 15 years ago doodling maps for my vision of "Metal Gear 2" on the graph paper I was supposed to be using for quadratic equations or whatever. (This is probably why I ended up not doing so well in math, but I can't help if numbers aren't as interesting as walking nuclear battle tanks.) Since then, every Metal Gear entry has left me wondering where the series will go from there.

Maybe my lack of interest is somewhat due to residual irritation over Konami's botched handling of the media's Metal Gear Solid 4 review process, but it has much more to do with the fact that the story is complete. MGS4 was a quality creation, but the things I want to see preserved and expanded across further games have little to do with its intrinsic Metal Gear-ness and are more about new or refined play mechanics which were frankly uncharacteristic for the series and would probably do better isolated and separated from the ludicrous foibles that stem from Hideo Kojima's increasingly self-indulgent sense of narrative. There is nowhere to go from here, except down. An MGS4 port to Xbox 360 would be fine, since it would open the series to everyone loath to buy a PS3 strictly for the sake of playing MGS4 and Valkyria Chronicle...but only if it's less of a technical disaster than the Xbox port of Metal Gear Solid 2.

Otherwise, the Metal Gear saga is over and done with, so far as most people are concerned; Snake's story is definitively wrapped, the Patriots are taken care of, and everyone got their happy ending or noble self-sacrifice or whatever. What can a new game offer? Needless filling in of minor backstory elements that'll simply make everything even more convoluted and obtuse? A way of undermining the last game's handful of genuinely great story moments? Oh, and of course lining corporate coffers at the expense of diluting the value of one of its best-loved franchises. Metal Gear is already ballooning toward a Star Wars-like creative self-destruction, and it's not too late to turn back! But alas, there's money to be made while some people still give a crap about the Metal Gear name. Plenty of people are speculating that the choice of the color green for the teaser image above was meant to tie into the Xbox 360, but I'm taking it as a more honest expression of the publisher's intents: i.e., fat loot.

MGS4 is a good stopping point for the series. I'd much rather see the team responsible for its creation to take its collective skill and knowledge and create something new and similar, yet not bogged down by 20 years of history, expectations, and (something akin to) continuity. There were some great ideas in MGS4, and if they hadn't been interrupted by Kojima constantly butting in to say, "Is this cool or what! Hey, remember that one part from Metal Gear Solid? Check it out, I do too! Wow, widescreen graphics mean splitscreen graphics! I AM AWESOME"....

Man, that would have been an amazing game, rather than an amazing game determined to trip itself up at every turn.

Although I guess I couldn't complain if this Talking Time thread were on-target and Metal Gear is about to go all Mexican pidgin mash-up on us. A Robert Rodriguez take on the series would, let's be honest, be a whole lot more palatable than its current direction.

category: games | forums | fifteen comments | §

Book 'em, Danno

04 December 08 | 16:11 | Posted by:

GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 has been selling far better than I had expected or anticipated. In fact, I've already sold through what I had initially planned as the print allotment, and orders keep coming in; I'd sort of figured the numbers I threw out in my announcement post would leave me with a healthy stack to sell off over the coming months, but they're all spoken for and I'm going to have to bump up the print run. It's great to see so many people interested, but it also makes me slightly anxious, because, you know. There's people out there.

That being said, I am definitely putting a cap on the hardcover books, because they require me to break out pen and pencil and draw, and at this rate I'm going to have an RSI before year's end. That's no good at all, so the available quantities of those are limited -- to exactly five two more, to be specific. If you're interested, at least drop me a line to speak for one, because once those are gone that's it. (Paperbacks have no such limits; if people still want one even after the print allotment is spent, I can set things up to allow direct orders from the printer.) Edit: Hardbacks are gone.

In the meantime, I'll start thinking ahead to interesting bonus content for Year One, Vol. 2. And I'll also think on Year Zero possibilities, since several people have expressed interest in things like Thumbnail Theatres and articles that have long since vanished from the site. Seriously: books are rad.

category: gamespite | forums | | §

So: remakes and adaptations

04 December 08 | 12:45 | Posted by: lumber_baron

They've been on my mind recently. Everyone's coming to the realization the Watchmen movie is actually coming out; the gears for The Spirit's media blitz have begun churning in earnest; the latest Star Trek film might count depending on how you look at it; and...I guess there's that Chun-Li movie.

Anyway, it's not like this is a new phenomenon. Old timey Hollywood would make the same film three separate times in the space of a decade. Shakespeare was never above stealing other people's stories and based Romeo and Juliet off a poem by Arthur Brooke. Which was based on a poem by Pierre Boaistuau. Which was based on a story by Matteo Bandello. Which was based on a story by Luigi da Porto. Which was based on a story by Masuccio Salernitano.

Still, nothing gets the blood of fans boiling quite like the idea of their favorite intellectual property being thrown to the insatiable wolves of Hollywood. And it's always Hollywood. No one ever gets upset that their favorite radio play is going to be molested by the New York suits at the publishing companies by making it into a novel. Novelizations, licensed games, and theater adaptations based on preexisting stories never quite coax the same kind of ire film adaptations do. It's an unconscious affirmation of the idea that movies occupy the top spot in the media hierarchy. Turn The Karate Kid into a musical? That's cute. Harmless. Produce a remake? KEEP YOUR GODDAMN HANDS OFF MY CHILDHOOD!

It's hard to articulate exactly why people care so much that a toy line they played with as kids is being turned into a summer blockbuster. Okay, sure, the detailed, rich narrative of your favorite graphic novel is going to be bastardized all to hell by some hack with an inflated shooting budget. So? Is this a problem? The studios aren't going to knock down your door and confiscate your book. You can still read it. Trust me. Hey Max Payne fans, your series was turned into a crappy movie starring Mark Wahlberg. That's too bad. But I can sympathize; the exact same thing happened to my favorite movie. And you know what? I don't care. Never have. Don't plan to.

Okay, so maybe more people will know about a story through the movie version. Once again, what's the problem? If you're arguing the merits of a piece of art and someone can't separate it from the film adaptation then they're not worth winning over anyway. There's a slim, non-zero chance the Watchmen movie's quality will approach that of the comic. There's a larger chance it will blow chunks. But does that matter? The comic's still right there for everyone to read, appreciate, and debate. Then we get to say "The book was better," which is really all we want anyway, isn't it?

category: film, games, media | forums | sixteen comments | §

Battle angel's thesis

03 December 08 | 22:04 | Posted by:

Volume 10 of Battle Angel Alita: Last Order is finally out, and thank goodness for that.

Battle Angel Alita: Last Order, Volume 10 -- Alita Goes Nova
Yukito Kishiro | Viz | Dec. 2008

For those unfamiliar, Last Order is a continuation of the excellent Battle Angel Alita manga, which Viz published from roughly 1994-1999 or thereabouts. The second volume, Tears of an Angel, was the first manga I read, and it instantly hooked me. It probably unrealistically raised my expectations for manga, too, because it was a fantastic change of pace from the hackneyed American superhero comics I'd grown so tired of. Eventually, I realized that manga's every bit as trite and hackneyed as anything from America, but I just happened to stumble into something well above the average to start me out; my first sample presented a skewed data point.

With Vol. 10, Last Order has officially run longer than the series it continues -- although actually, that happened midway through Vol. 9, since the new series retcons the second half of the ninth volume of the original story. The first Alita series ended on a pretty unsatisfying note: the original story concept began as the Ouroboros dream sequence featured across volumes eight and nine and grew from there, which made it the story's true climax; the Japanese title for the series is even GUNMM (Gun Dream), for crying out loud. Everything after the Ouroboros is an anticlimax, all the worse for having been penned by Kishiro in a sporadic rush due to illness.

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category: manga | forums | nine comments | §

I hate my friends

03 December 08 | 18:41 | Posted by: calorie_mate

The good thing about befriending someone that works for a game company is that it just proves to me how lucky I am there’s no such thing as a door-to-door videogame salesman. Every time I hang out with Atlus employees, for example, I ultimately end up buying an Atlus game as a result. Sometimes it’s simply demoing a game for me, sometimes it’s as extreme as coming to my house and walking me to a Gamestop to pick up a recent release, but the result is always the same: more money into Atlus’ pockets. Case-in-point: during my most recent visit to Southern California, I was literally driven to a Best Buy and told we weren’t leaving until I bought Dokapon Kingdom. Talk about customer "service".

The good news, though, is that Dokapon Kingdom is actually pretty fun! I hadn’t heard of it until the day I bought it, so in case you’re unaware: Dokapon Kingdom is essentially Mario Party, but without minigames and an RPG thrown in for good measure. Utilizing the one-on-one duels in Suikoden with special abilities thrown in, you fight enemies and friends to gain levels, save towns, and explore the world. The twist is that the ultimate goal isn’t to save the world; oh no, it’s far more devious than that. The main objective is to be stronger than your friends, so that you can defeat them in battle and then humiliate them, with everything from ugly haircuts to (my personal favorite) changing their name to whatever you want.

As with other boardgame, uh, games, Dokapon Kingdom isn’t much fun as a single player experience, but that does tend to create a sort of meta challenge: how do you take full advantage of the game’s best feature and stick them with a name that would make your mom blush, without risking pissing off the only friends you somehow convinced to overlook the art style and play with you? It would be an interesting social experiment to track someone’s behavior in this game versus the exact same game if it had online multiplayer and see if the owner is more inclined to be a jerk if he wasn’t afraid no one would play with him. As it stands, it probably says something about humanity that this isn’t an issue at all; who doesn’t love embarrassing their friends?

Wait. First they force me to buy the game, and now I’m unintentionally shilling for it? Something’s definitely wrong with this picture.

category: games | forums | seven comments | §

Thanksgiving crawl: the sequel

03 December 08 | 10:16 | Posted by: Kat

So my last post was meant with a fair bit of... uh... discussion. And this is good! I like it when my posts spur discussion on one topic or another. Of course, somewhere along the way I became Kat the Chick Who Is Too Hardcore For Smash Brothers. I think I've just been treated to a sneak preview of my ironic punishment in hell. Lucky me.

It's my own fault, of course, for making it seem as if I was waving my hand and dismissing Smash Brothers as a "viable tournament fighter." My point (which was a relatively minor point in the grand scheme of things) was pretty clear in my head, but it seemed to get lost in the jumble of words that constituted my feelings on Smash Brothers. Writing is kind of a bastard like that.

If you really want to know, I'm mostly just a frustrated Smash Brothers player who spent years trying to master all those crazy techniques floating around the Internet and ultimately failed. It seems that I'm no better at pulling off wave dashes and meteors than I am at performing aerial raves. As I've said before, I'm doomed to be forever mediocre (or worse) at games, but I keep trying to get better. I keep trying with all my little heart. Unfortunately, trying and failing to play like all those professionals on the Youtube videos just left me frustrated and bitter. And when Brawl made a relatively quick exit from my group's regular multiplayer rotation, that frustration turned into disenchantment. So it was with much delight that I discovered this past Thanksgiving that Brawl is still in fact fun provided that I leave behind all my preconceptions, turn items back on and stop worrying about which stage I'm playing on. (Exception: I still hate New Pork City and Big Blue.)

This seems to be true of a lot of games that I've been playing recently -- even games that I'm nominally good at, like Pokémon. It's reached the point where I'm actively avoiding multiplayer-oriented games like Call of Duty 4 and Team Fortress 2 (both of which I thought were reasonably entertaining) simply because I know I don't have the time or the energy to learn to play well enough to even hold my own against random strangers. I would rather play a good RPG.

That doesn't mean there isn't a certain amount of fun to be had in joining a competitive community. I know, because I've done it with WarCraft III and with Pokémon. But at some point, the payoff of winning a tournament stopped being equal to the effort that I put into maintaining my skills. And looking at all the effort that the competitive community has put into turning a game that's supposedly "not about winners and losers but the process of getting there" (in the words of Mr. Sakurai) into yet another tournament fighter, I shake my head and wonder if it is actually worth all that effort.

Who am I to judge though? If others find competitive Smash fun and fulfilling, then more power to them. They just better watch out if they play against me, because I'm totally turning on smash balls. And I pilot a mean Landmaster.

category: games | forums | 44 comments | §

New Games Plus: I hate the uncanny valley

02 December 08 | 23:33 | Posted by: reibeatall

As our gaming systems become more and more powerful, the expectation of "better" graphics goes along with that. Ask 95% of gamers what "better graphics" means, and they'll likely answer "realistic." So what they're really asking for is more realistic graphics. It's a shame, too, because realistic graphics aren't all that they're cracked up to be. Every generation's attempts at graphics that try to imitate real life only look good until something comes out that looks even more real; after that, it's hard to go back to the old style. The more realistic the graphics, the deeper into the uncanny valley they delve. And nobody likes the uncanny valley. It's like looking at a soulless video game of real dolls.

Thankfully, developers are realizing that there are better ways to doing things. Now, we have games like Okami, Valkyria Chronicles, and now the new Prince of Persia -- the latter conveniently being released this week. These games have diverged from the ever-popular life-like visual approach and instead opt for something a bit more, well, artistic. While such games might not draw in audiences with their graphics at the moment, they'll hold up for years to come. Compare that to something like Condemned, which doesn't look very good anymore -- and it's only three years old.

But hey, enough pointless rambling, it's time for celebration. The winter rush will so be over, but already releases are thinning out! After the jump, witness the only two games worth a damn this week:

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category: games | forums | eight comments | §

New Game Plus: Designated downloads for 12/02/08

02 December 08 | 09:22 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

As you peer through your turkey coma, you see a few ports, a little rehash, maybe a spin-off off or two looming on the digital horizon. Nothing major, perhaps nothing even worth rousing yourself off your lazy couch to download, but maybe a few of these things will be worth blowing a day's lunch money on when you finally relocate your sluggish mass. And that's all you're really looking for, right?

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category: games | forums | seven comments | §

Add to Queue #67: She-ninjas

01 December 08 | 21:45 | Posted by: vsrobot

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #67 | December 2, 2008

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category: film | forums | 19 comments | §

GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1

01 December 08 | 10:20 | Posted by:

So the sample copy of the first GameSpite book should arrive next Wednesday, right? It just occurred to me that this works out to about a 10-day turnaround time on printing and shipping. That means that if I want to get the books out in time for everyone who wants one for Christmas, I should probably take orders now to have the shipping ready to go as quickly as possible. As added incentive, my webhost sent me a bill last night for the next two years' worth of basic server fees -- several hundred bucks, which doesn't include the additional monthly fees for private bandwidth and databases -- so it would be wise for me to round up cash moneys as quickly as possible so I can fund both the books and the site. Whoever compared GameSpite to the GIA the other day was right on one count, anyway: this stupid site is expensive to run.

So here's how it is going to work: GameSpite Year One, Vol. 1 is a 352 page book that reprints half the articles published at GameSpite.net from the time the contributor system launched (June 2007, I think it was) to one year later. It's half because the publishing company doesn't allow for 700-page books. So you're getting neatly alphabetized articles from A (actually 3 in Three) through L (Little Samson). Also included is a bit of never-before-published mystery material.

I'm having two different versions of the book printed up: roughly 100 paperbacks (possibly more in the extremely unlikely chance those sell out) and 20 premium hardbound books. The softbound books will sell for $25 apiece -- which I realize is a lot for a 350-page book, but that's small press for you. After printing and shipping and redistrubution and royalties for the contributors, the profits from 100 copies should be just enough to pay for the next two years of basic GameSpite hosting. The hardbound books will sell for $60 apiece, which, obviously, is a whole hell of a lot to pay for a 350-page book. But these include an original color illustration of your choosing, you know, as incentive. Also, the cost of both variations covers shipping, unless you live outside the U.S. or Canada, in which case you'll need to pay an extra three bucks per book. Because shipping books via international airmail is expensive, it turns out.

Edit: Content listing (ripped directly from the dust jacket) behind the jump-cut.

Edit edit: My initial intended print run of hardcover books is, unbelievably enough, spoken for. But since nothing has gone to press yet, I'm willing to up the print count if anyone else wants one. However, any hardcover edition ordered after this point probably won't arrive until January. Doodles take time. Also of note: I've sold exactly enough to cover the cost of printing and shipping for the entire run, which is good. It means I won't be going in the hole for this and can start thinking about the second volume a few months from now.

Edit edit edit: Hardbacks are now gone forever. Sorry! You will have to live without my sloppy hand-drawn artwork.

Edit edit edit edit: Additional orders beyond this point definitely won't arrive until late January.

Final edit: I am no longer taking orders as the book is well oversold. Second printing will be soon! And the first books are going in the mail this week. All books should be shipped by the 20th of January -- sorry for the delay, but the printer was much slower to fulfill my purchase than expected.

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