Posted by puzzlehead | 0 Comments
Speaking of Comics & Video Games: Port Sherry ...
The tag line for Pedro Arzipe’s Port Sherry web comic is "When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man…". The March 4, 2009 comic titled "The Obsolete Add-on" so deftly illustrates how far we’ve come with video games as well as how much we’ve lost.
In this era of next generation consoles we are able to celebrate ‘the next big thing’. For those of us who were born and raised on Atari 2600 home arcades, ColecoVision, Intellivision, the Odyssey and the Commodore 64 we can only marvel at how much detail and raw computing resources are required to produce the modern video game. Whereas we were used to 16 color sprites sporadically moving across the screen today’s PC & console games regale us with things we only fantasized about: particle physics, bump maps and texturizing, variable light sources much less worlds which did not require linear play and environments that allowed you to interact with them.
"The Obsolete Add-on" captures the innocence of those early years of video gaming and pretty much nails the generational differences between gamers of yesteryear and today. Whereas back in the day we relied on our imagination to pretend that we were driving the Formula 1 racers in Activision’s Grand Prix these days were drifting through corners in games like Gran Tourismo or the Need For Speed series. We played Atari’s ‘Combat!’ and hid behind blocks on the screens which were buildings and bunkers, ricocheting our shells on certain game settings while these days we’re reliving almost every military campaign imaginable in gritty, realistic detail. My Samus from Metroid looked like a gingerbread cookie; today she is rendered with muscle tone, flowing locks and ample boobies.
Are we spoiled these days? In a sense, yes. For a good portion of the video gaming experience we no longer have to think and players can concentrate instead on the game play. Do I regret the marvelous advancements that have been made to bring the games industry where it is? That’s a toss up. I can’t wait to see where we end up and how advanced the system and the games become.
I whole heartedly recommend reading through Arzipe’s comic for some interesting commentary on gaming.
Read MorePosted by Smash | 0 Comments
Fall In for Fallout 3
Playing Fallout 3 was an unique and wholely rewarding experience. Bethesda Gameworks, know for it’s immersive, robust storyline, delivers all that and much more in this fantastic RPG, available in the Xbox 360 and PC game formats.
An unusual twist on the standard “Dungeons and Dragons” RPG, Fallout 3 places the player in a post-apocalyptic dystopia, and provides a background that leaves the character, as well as the player, enthralled and confused about the bizarre world around him. The main character is born and raised in “Vault 101″ one of several underground dwellings meant to survive a nuclear fallout; while also providing the designers some demented scientific experiments. Your character, leaves his home for good one day, in pursuit of his missing father and is exposed to the strange and fantastic world around Metropolitan Washington D.C. set in the not-too-distant future.
Bethesda’s developers masterfully craft this world that seamlessly blends 1950’s kitsch public service announcements with the most gaudy of modern pop-culture to produce a wonderfully garish result. Just one example of this are the retro bobble heads, featuring an in-game collector stand where players can proudly display all 30 collector items within the game
The bobble heads represent just one of the many aspects of the game that allow such a detailed, rich experience. Conforming to the standard RPG characteristics, players have 7 basic attributes: Strength, Perception, Endurance, Charisma, Intelligence, Agility, and Luck (S.P.E.C.I.A.L.) as well as 13 skills: Barter, Big guns, Energy Weapons, Explosives, Lockpick, Medicine, Melee, Repair, Science, Small guns, Sneak, Speech, and Unarmed. Players must configure their character tailored to their individual desires. Personally, I chose a weaker character who excelled in charisma, bartering and luck. While this afforded me more goods, it weakened me by being less capable of wielding all of the equipment throughout the game. Finally, as players level-up, they also can round out Perks; specialized skills/talents ranging from animal friend, an ability to befriend animals, to a sniper ability, improving the chance of executing critical hits. My personal favorite is “Mysterious Stranger” giving the player random encounters from a mysterious man in a trench-coat who appears to finish off enemies during combat. Each visit, logged in a stat screen, produced a “Hell Yeah!” from me each time.
All of these vast player attributes can easily provide gamers with untold hours of game play as one explores the various skills and how they change the interaction within the game. But this is Bethesda, known for its vast side-quests and immeasurable worlds. By the story’s end, I had uncovered over 120 unique locations within the game map, and easily had dozens more left to explore. Even more fascinating are the random character encounters, such as a friendly mutant known as “Uncle Leo”, perhaps homage to the infamous Seinfeld character of the same name. Rounding out this world are the incredible graphics, especially the monsters. Good luck when you encounter a Behemoth; I wasted 3 mini-nukes, 4 missiles and about 5 lives the first time I crossed paths with one.
After all is said and done, the weakest part of Fallout 3, lies in the main story quest itself. A thin premise, searching for your missing father, leads the player through the world but ultimately completes the game with a defined ending. With this, the player has no ability to return and continue exploring the amazing world, except by loading a previously saved game. Similarly, players who want to enjoy Down-Loadable Content (DLC) must play those add-ons from previous saves; a somewhat disheartening experience.
All in, this game is a thoroughly rewarding experience which allows a player to lose themselves in 50 or more hours of game play. Bethseda Gameworks created an immersive experience in a world that you can’t get enough of. Learning about this world was equally enjoyable as exploring and learning about one of my other favorite Xbox 360 games, Bioshock.
Read MorePosted by puzzlehead | 3 Comments
Street Fighter IV Hell
Let me preface this post by saying that I’m an old school video game junkie. During the golden age of arcades and stand alone machines, I couldn’t get enough of them. My friends and I would ride our bikes up to the airport in Norfolk, VA, and hang out there to play all the cool video games. They even had Dragon’s Lair AND Space Ace!
Fast forward to today. I’ve been playing Street Fighter IV for the Sony Playstation 3 for the past week or so. As someone who only plays video games every once in a blue moon because a) being an old adult means your priorities have radically changed and b) being an old adult means your reflexes for fighting games are similar to a sloth wrestling a tortoise, I ‘ve marvelled at how pretty the game is. However, here are a few gripes:
- Seriously? I have to UNLOCK Cammy? What the Hell is up with that? She’s like one of the only characters that I like to ogle and now I have to unlock her to play with…uh…to play her?
- Remember how I said my reflexes suck? Yeah, well, that means that in order to unlock every character I have to play the game not on "Easy", not on "Very Easy" but on "Easiest" mode. How demeaning. However, after playing the game I kept looking at the difficulty settings and looked for "Biggest Pussy" mode after "Easiest"
- I hear the XBox 360 has minimal load times. Guess what? The PS3’s load times are pretty irritating.
- The controls are a real bitch. I really haven’t played Street Fighter since, well, Street Fighter. I might have played Street Fighter II back in the day. Reading through the move commands made me lament the fact that I had to memorize all these arcane stick and button combinations.
- I can see the need to buy one of the arcade style controls from companies such as Madcat. However, do I want to shell out around another $100 for it?
Don’t get me wrong, I really do enjoy the game regardless of these shortcomings. However, playing the final boss, Seth, with a character like Vega or Viper really is an exercise in patience and self-control. For instance, I had to practice tremendous control NOT to throw my controller at my 55" flatscreen.
Keep in mind, being this inept at a fighting game still won’t stop me from buying the new King of Fighters, Tekken 6 or the next Virtua Fighter.
Read MorePosted by grymmjack | 9 Comments
GUN
 |
Publisher: Activision Inc. Developer: Neversoft ESRB: M Category: Action Available On: • XBOX • XBOX 360 • GameCube • PS2 • PC |
From the makers of the excellent Tony Hawk Pro Skater series, Neversoft has done it again with GUN.
Back story
Basically the story in GUN is one of revenge and mystery. The main character (and your role in the game) is a young man who finds himself in the middle of the adventure of his life. What starts out as a normal day of hunting and gathering for trade and barter, turns out to be the beginning of his trials. As he and his father are trading in their furs and meats on the steamboat, the steamboat is ransacked by wild rebels in search of some chest. While putting up a valiant fight (with decent AI) his father (or what he thought was his father) is murdered before him by this band of drunken barbarians, and he escapes from the conflict with his life intact (you play through all of this stuff). Later we find out that his father was not really his father. Much of the questing that ensues deals with learning more about the main character and trying to discover who his parents are. Slowly the real reason for the raid on the steamboat is learned as you play the game, with new villians and hierarchies of characters are introduced into the storyline. The goal is revenge in GUN. To avenge the deaths of the innocents.
Shown above: main character riding horse and firing pistol, while action ensues all around him in teh distance.
Gameplay
In GUN, you play the role of a cowboy/hunter turned gunslinger/desperado. Much of the game involves travelling across the wide expanses of gorgeously 3D rendered landscapes and doing so on foot is entirely boring — you ride horses. Initially horse riding is a little cumbersome, but the graphics and the "feel" of the horse riding is superb. After spending an hour of riding around on a horse and learning the sprinting and moves of the horse (it can slide and trample and sprint then throw on the brakes and slide and buck, etc all moves impacting the people around the horse) it really becomes almost second nature. The controls are awesome, and the tension and programming of the physics of the horse is very very good. This is necessary because what happens on horseback requires skill and dexterity — gunfights. You can dismount and mount horses freely, and there is no real consequence to stealing any old horse. Some people may feel this takes away from the realism of the game, but I don’t think so. So you ride your horse alot because the maps are enormous, taking upwards of 5 to 10 minutes at a time to reach the extreme boundaries of the levels. You can walk and run, and I must pay special note here to how the walking and running in GUN for it is also very very good. You use the left analog stick to look and the right analog stick to move, nothing fancy there, however, the feel of how you move and look is excellent. The tension from creeping at a slow john-wayne swagger (and man they did a good job with that too), to walking to a full out sprint is perfect. Sometimes I found myself just swaggering around listening to my spurs clink. You can duck and jump and hide behind objects that provide cover in firefights as well. There are also various vehicles such as trains and stagecoaches and boats that, while you cannot pilot them, provide very exciting and cool props throughout the game.
Aiming the weapons is handled very well, I have no complaints about any of that. Choosing a weapon is simple work and rifles and pistols and bows and knives and tomohawks and hatchets are all available at your disposal, with 3 to 4 upgradeable slots in inventory to give you something to look forward to. As your character becomes better at doing things and completes missions and sidequests your statistics improve, new minigame missions become available, and so on. It’s a typical action-rpg situation where you upgrade your character as you go. I felt that the pace of the upgrades was very good, and nothing was really given to me without me having to earn it by working for it spilling blood and splitting skulls. Shit I almost forgot, this has bullet-time too (only they call it ‘quick-draw’ but really it’s max payne bullet-time) where you toggle slow motion, and just blow the living shit out of everything that moves with gunslinger speed and a neat ‘targetting’ system is added bonus that shows arrows right or left and you use the + stick to cycle through them and blast them back to hell.
There are several towns throughout the game, all of which have their own unique characters and personas throughout them. It is about as immersive as GTA 3 in that there are several ’spots’ you can go to in towns to do things like buy equipment, find missions, talk to people, etc, but you cannot really go inside every building. You CAN go inside some buildings but they are always obvious. All of the things in the game that you relate with on a regular basis can be upgraded. And health can be restored by drinking from a flask of whiskey – which are found throughout the game. The one thing I must comment on as well is the lack of ammunition — or more appropriately the spread out location of the ammo makes you want to conserve and loadup before you do something. So it’s kind of nice to just waste time riding around the countryside looking for ammo and loading up in between big plot-twisting missions — side quests are clearly marked and you have a chance not to take them after finding out what they are. Side quests are pretty cool and range from several differnet themes; bounty hunting (dead or alive), horsemanship (rustling cattle, pony express (ala crazy taxi) deliveries), lawman (help local lawmen in towns kill bad guys), and hunting. The various quests are cool and really add to the entire game as a whole. You are never locked into a quest and can always restart one at any time, and you never have to linearly continue with the main storyline until you are damned good and ready. I loved that freedom.
Gunfights are a blast, and riding around on a horse using my rifle to blow the heads off of bad guys was a bonafide de-light! (excuse the western slang). The hit locations are awesome. As mentioned there is the head, the hands, the legs, feet, weapon hands, etc. And the game, in rockstar fashion, keeps track of these statistics for you as well as your accuracy and so on. It also helps to look at the stats to see what you have left to do and how much of the game you have completed. The weapons have different dynamics and attributes. Pistols carry less ammo per reload, but generally are better
close range guns. While rifles (several kinds, including sniper rifles called sureshots), provide much more range and accuracy when zoomed in. Shotguns provide a blast area of effect. There are also melee weapons such as knives, hatchets, and tomahawks (lots of fun!) as well as explosives (tnt, molotov cocktails, etc), and indian weapons; bow and arrow, fire arrows, etc. The different levels of weapons are well balanced and make it fun to look forward to getting a better one. I was a rifleman almost 80% of the time, and not until i was about 70% completed with the game did my rifle get upgraded. But boy when it did, shoooooo-eeee! Look at those skulls explode hoss!
Graphics
The graphics are above average for this kind of title in my opinion. I was seriously expecting much much less, but GUN really shines in the visuals. There were almost zero camera artifacts or problems with clipping etc. In fact I can only remember one time when there was a clipping mess, and I was standing inside my horse but in the games defense I had galloped directly up to a mud adobe wall and slammed on the horsebrakes and leaped off in mid air while firing my rifle (yes this is the kind of great shit you can do in the game). The variation and historical accuracy of the different settings was believable enough, for instance, towns looked like towns and churches like churches and old forts like old forts, and mines like mines, etc. The color and shaders used in the game is very pretty to look at, though there is no real weather effects besides night and day and the timeline can jump suddenly to night and back to day depending on the mission settings (which I didnt mind). The attention paid to the detail of the models and the textures was totally consistent as was the level designs. You never ran into a spot in the game where it was obvious that the developers slacked off. The special effects of fire and explosions and especially the blood are all done well, but the best part is when you are riding hard and fast across the desert and pan the camera to a low perspective following angle — the game reverts into a celshader mode almost and the dust kicked up by your steed looks real and the shadows cast from the dust look real. It all looks very very convincing. The modeling of the characters was done well, with enough differentiation between different characters to be atleast acceptible (there are duplicates of course).
Shown above: main character fighting first big boss battle against minor villian.
Sound
The sound and music is decent. The sound effects are good and totally fit the game and it’s various modes of play. The voice acting is done well and I am not sure but I think dennis hopper was the voice of dear old dad. There are times when music is played such as in saloons by pianists and such, but there really isn’t much music to be had, and that also lends to it’s authenticity a bit more IMO. The horses and animals sounds great. The micing and mastering for the various aural elements in the game was done professionally and the levels are all consistent (too often I will find a game that has one voice act completely contrary to another — be it voice actors sibelence variations or acoustic reverberations, or noise level).
Fun Factor
The game rocks in every way that a game like this can. I was never bored. My ONLY complaint was when sometimes my horse would die (yes your horse takes damage and suffers and cannot be ridden too hard or he will die/become lame/etc) during a skirmish or a bounty hunt, deep in the desert. After successfully completing the mission I would be on foot. Fuck! Because it’s like miles to walk! However, you can always hit start and go to the map (which is helpful too) and start the story-quest and abort it to get back to civilization but I chose not to. I chose to wander around trying to find a wild horse 
Which through the game I became a very knowledgeable scout of my territory — and that is something that I can’t say about most games. The wide-open-ness of the entire area and levels really gives a feel of freedom and simulation. Your horse can jump too, and there are parts in the game where you can jump like off a mountain top (rAH). The side quests were just as fun if not more fun than the main storyline because each sidequest adds stats to your character, opens other sidequests, and so forth. You get to earn money (which is very rare but not too rare — you are never given a ton of money) by completing these quests and then you can save to upgrade equipment and weapons and so on. The game is a blast too because there seems to always be something you missed or need to do. It really gives you a lot to accomplish and a lot to look forward to. I am at about 75% complete with the game and am having a blast. After I complete it, I will likely replay it (because the stats and because it’s just fun). Which leads me to my last complaint.
The length of the gameplay is not that good. I have been playing about 9 hours now and i’m 75% done with the single player. GUN is xbox live aware, but on my modded system I cant do squat with xbox live so I am stuck in single player land. Anyway, this game is one of the best I have played on the xbox in a while. It’s got enough challenge to appeal to hardcore (with difficulty settings too) gamer, and enough fun factor and instant-gratification for people like me who just like to play games that are fun and exciting for a bit at a time. It has enough A.D.D. goodness that you really cant get bored for long, and it has enough flesh and blood and guts to suit most RPG fans. Really this game is an instant classic in my book, and I would highly recommend it to any fellow geek.
Conclusion
Rating: 5 stars.
Every part of this game has been enjoyable. I may have a slightly biased opinion because of smash forcing me to read the Dark Tower series (thanks!) and pretending I am Roland Deschain while I play this game (and a young strapping Roland I would be indeed, I wot), but please don’t let that sway you from trying it for yourself. GUN wont disappoint you unless you are a complete and total jackassaurus. Speaking of the Gunslinger, how great would this game engine be for a DT1-7 game saga license! Man seriously, playing this I was thinking "this is perfect for the DT games if the movies ever come out and games are made for them, I hope to god that they use neversofts engine and maybe a bit of Rockstars awesome influence).
Posted by Elusion | 6 Comments
Condemned: Criminal Origins
I was browsing the displays at Best Buy looking for an interesting title just two days before I plunked down my hard earned cash for an XBOX 360. It had to be something fun, original, and most of all look the part of a next-gen high definition game. Condemned ended up catching my eye. After reading the synopsis on the back of the box and checking out the graphics, I thought this game would knock my socks off. After playing the game, it ended up scaring the socks off my feet.
As I look back through the years of my gaming life, the games that stick with me the most are the ones that were innovative. The ability for a game to completely immerse the player in its environment however implausible is crucial. Condemned fits the bill.
The game is by far the scariest/most disturbing game I’ve ever played. It is the current reigning champion of the survival-horror genre. Overall, I can only fault the game on two points. First off, the game is too short. I finished the game in about 4 days (or 10 hours). Secondly, using the CSI gadgets gets a bit repetitive. Neither one of these points would keep me from highly recommending this title.
Posted by Dex | 6 Comments
Kameo
Of all the xbox 360 launch titles, one was at the top of my list.. A game that had been in development since the days of the Nintendo 64… Kameo – elements of power. Of the reviews I had read, and screens I had seen, it looked to be the best game for the next-gen system’s humble beginnings. However, I had also read that the game was very short, and didn’t have much of a replay value.. so I decided to rent it, rather than buying.
The first thing people will notice from Kameo is its appearance. Half “cartoony Nintendo 3D platform” game, and half “High Def, amazingly detailed” game, it is a visual feast for the eyes. The sound is amazing too, with deep bass, excellent voice acting, and amazing surround sound effects. The orchestral score for Kameo is a high caliber arrangement that enhances the atmosphere and often times makes the environments feel a lot more grand and sweeping than they actually are. The game also progressed along nicely, with very few “loading” screens, and a very helpful hint system.
