Curmudgeon Gamer

Simple, beautiful pixel/vector art

2009-05-13T11:30:00.002-04:00

If you're a Commodore 64 fan (shame on you otherwise), you'll appreciate these derived works. Found on Daily Rodent via GSW.
Click for giant image.

Pixel art to vectorized image. Simple concept, beautifully executed.

Gamer Labor: City of Heroes

2009-04-28T11:18:00.004-04:00

City of Heroes recently allowed gamers to create their own questlines. I've only played CoH briefly, and my impression apparently was, "Tired engine, bland missions, and large headaches means they likely won't be getting my dough."

Having gamers pay for the privilege of providing free labor has always fascinated me. I've got AWB (Another WoW Blog) myself, and have posted a bit on Thottbot and WoWWiki. I guess you'd have to add Player vs. Player as another sort of gamer labor.

But CoH has taken this free labor to another level by letting players create in-game quest lines. It can't be that hard; heavens knows the quests in WoW and my recollection of CoH are usually pretty boring. "Kill X of Y and get Z from their corpse" just about sums up the typical quest experience, somewhat reminiscent of Matt's and my critiques of a number of games being little more than variations on the "find key, eliminate enemies, exit level" theme.

Which is why a comment like this one from the City of Heroes' news site seems self-deflationary:

We did some data mining of our own, and 3,800 surpasses the amount of content that we, the developers, have made for all of City of Heroes and City of Villains combined. In just one day our users did more than we could in almost five years.

What does such a comment tell us? I understood why I'd buy Quake -- for the engine -- and then play mods released for free. I'm not so sure why I'd spend a monthly fee to play user created content. More interesting, though, is figuring out why players would give this content to CoH so freely and why CoH would say it's the equivalent to years of their own work. I wonder why Second Life or an equivalent doesn't play engine to these sorts of adventure construction set games. We've obviously gotten to the point where quest creation is a franchiseable process, easy to reproduce by almost any french frying knucklehead.

Fallujah? No.

2009-04-07T09:29:00.003-04:00

Konami is making a game about the 2004 battle in Fallujah, Iraq. From Joystiq's article (emphasis added):

Unfortunately, for all the realism touted by the game's developer, Konami's VP of marketing, Anthony Crouts, gives the impression that the publisher's still playing it safe, saying, "We're not trying to make social commentary. We're not pro-war. We're not trying to make people feel uncomfortable. We just want to bring a compelling entertainment experience. At the end of the day, it's just a game."

I just finished listening to Fiasco by Thomas Ricks. It covers the first few years of the second U.S.-Iraq war* as well as some 1990s background of some of the principals. Frankly, you can't come away from the facts of the second war, and that Fallujah battle in general, without feeling a sense of profound dismay. It is one of the culminations of many critical botched actions that preceded it. (It's at this point that I usually come back to the picture of the 3-year-old Iraqi boy whose leg was blown off completely. Thanks, Mike. I'll never forget that one.)

Fallujah is a fat, nasty reminder of how screwed up things were -- and still are -- and I have a hard time believing that it will be treated appropriately. Compelling entertainment? No. Not at all.

* Ricks concludes that historians may eventually consider what we see as two U.S.-Iraq wars as a single longer one: hot war in 1991, followed by containment, then another hot war starting in 2003, followed by more containment.

Another week, another typo

2009-03-31T16:45:00.004-04:00

Sony really needs someone watching what they type. This week it's Samurai Shodown Anthology. Yes, that's right "Shodown". No, I don't know why, but that's how it's spelled.

Unless you're the Sony PlayStation page showing the game:
I know it's a weird name and all, but come on!

Now we'll see if it takes a few hours and Sony magically fixes this. (As happened last time.)

Finally, registering Nintendo products is good for something

2009-03-16T23:58:00.000-04:00

Well lookee here, Nintendo sent me an invite to try out some "DSi" doohicky they're releasing soon. Seems like it was due to registerin' a whole mess-load of products!

Well shucks howdy! By huckleberry! Gee whilikers! Wang-dang-doodle! ...

They even say we can bring in our DS Lites, I suppose to drive home to the poor things how numbered are their days. Maybe I can shame them into doing something about the busted hinge on mine.

Reminds me of Tempest 2000

2009-03-05T20:35:00.002-05:00

I'm not really sure what the heck this is, but I liked it.

A hacker discusses the Wii's limitations

2009-03-05T04:27:00.004-05:00

Is it not beyond strange that Wii homebrew is able to do so much more on the Wii than even the official software?

Homebrew hackers have found ways to play DVD movies, fully access SD cards over 2GB in size, use USB storage in the form of both flash memory and physical hard drives, access Samba shares over the wireless network and connect to Bluetooth devices for storage and using cell phones as a remote control. In their hands the Wii has become both a powerful media player and an emulation haven; add Virtual Console to the homebrew emulators and, excepting PCs, it is by far the system capable of playing the most games, able to play those of the NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, TG16, NeoGeo, Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, NeoGeo Pocket, Atari Lynx, Atari 800/XL/5200, Commodore 64, Apple II, Commodore Amiga, Atari ST, Atari 2600, Sinclair and ColecoVision.

Since Nintendo makes money selling Virtual Console games I could perhaps understand why they haven't made available any good general-purpose emulatiors. And it's not like the other manufacturers are keen to develop such software. But those hardware limitations are maddening. While Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 consoles have only become more feature-rich over time, the Wii's feature set is nearly the same as it was on launch day. When they announce some great new feature to get everyone to update their firmware, it turns out to be something like (gasp!) using a USB keyboard in the message center. In the most recent update they (bigger gasp!) even let people use it in the Mii Channel, where it's useful for entering names and nothing else.

For a long while I've seen this as the result of Nintendo having a uniquely tech-unfriendly culture. People joke about how Nintendo is like a toy company more than a software company. While I do like their games and think, in terms of game design, they're the #1 company in the world, I have to admit that this is largely true. Their system software design is woefully nearsighted. The departure of Yamaguchi has done nothing to make the company more technology-savvy.

Nintendo would never themselves admit that their system is limited, especially when the Wii is exploding sales records, so the best person to ask about why this is so would be one of the hackers who has found out how to work around so many of Nintendo's stupid limitations, marcan of Team Twiizer, one of the people behind the super-awesome Homebrew Channel.

Here are his thoughts on the subject. In summary, all Wii software features have to be implemented by the games themselves. Other than the TCP/IP stack, the Wii's IOS system software very little in the way of features at all to Wii software! Presumably they have some libraries that they distribute to developers that implement the basic stuff like returning to the menu and the Home screen.

Those features that it does provide are tied to the version of IOS it was developed for. This is possible because all Wii system updates, with one exception, add an entire new copy of the IOS software to the Wii's built-in flash memory! So a game that was written for IOS 9, the earliest version that can run games, will always use IOS 9, completely ignoring any later system features Nintendo could add. This makes a kind of sense if one imagines Nintendo as being super-cautious about breaking older games, but come on, Sony doesn't seem to have any problems with it, and even Microsoft, which is infamous for just this kind of bug in Windows, has had no problems making new 360 features work with launch games.

While it could be argued that the mindset behind this approach has been the source of the Wii's appeal to most of its audience (most of whom are probably just as non-tech-savvy), that doesn't mean that the system's workings need be dominated by this thinking. C'mon Nintendo, the world doesn't run on NES hardware any more.

Either disappointment or glorious success (Nintendo DSi)

2009-02-18T09:14:00.006-05:00

So the Nintendo DSi is coming out on 5 April 2009 in the U.S. at a price of $170. (Announcement and demo video at Wired, among others.)

Either this is going to blow up in Nintendo's face or they'll come out looking even more invincible.

For a while now Sony's been selling the PlayStation Portable (PSP) for $170 by itself or $200 bundled. According to data provided to me by NPD, and some figuring done on my own through other sources, the average for PSP sales has been $190 or higher. Significantly fewer people buy the core system and many are willing to jump up $30 for a bundle.

All the while the Nintendo DS has been $130. Each month Nintendo DS sales are at least twice the monthly PSP sales. It's not that the PSP sells poorly -- it actually does pretty well -- but the Nintendo DS is in much higher demand. Yet, in January 2009, sales for the PSP were off significantly.

I don't want to read too much into a single data point, but I think it's possible that Americans (increasingly pessimistic about the economy and the future) are finally reaching the point where a slick $200 handheld system isn't feasible. Even worse, they may be saying a $170 handheld isn't worthwhile.

And that's where I'm worried that Nintendo's DSi won't catch on. The upgrades here are the SD card slot, downloadable software, and two cameras. (The GBA slot is gone, but my anecdotal experience leads me to believe no one will notice.) I believe (although I don't know for sure) that it will also play more nicely with modern wireless access points. (Goodbye WEP, I hope.)

But like the PS3, the DSi is making a proposition based on logic that the consumer won't buy. The PS3 is a great media center, hi-def player, and game system. It also is a decent way to browse the web in the living room. But it's also $400.

The DSi is 95% of the Nintendo DS, with added features -- cameras, downloadable software, and a card slot -- that bump the cost up to $170. To paraphrase a line from an article I once wrote: A consumer who can't afford a $170 handheld still won't be able to afford it just because it has two cameras and new software capabilities.

All that said, I'm terrible with predictions. That's essentially why I write about the sales figures after they come out instead of trying to predict them. And, it should be noted, the Nintendo DS launched at a higher price and eventually dropped to its current $130 level. That may well happen with the DSi, and at that point at least it should return to crazy-wild sales levels.

Review: BioShock (PS3)

2009-02-04T18:41:00.005-05:00

Yes, you should play BioShock. Not finish, mind you, but play. You can get everything you need by reaching the big confrontation, putting the controller down, and pretending that was the final act.

BioShock gets one thing perfect: a beautiful and dark alternate history vision of a 1950s-era dystopia, Rapture, created on the ocean floor by an affluent Objectivist. Decor, apparel, and music blend together brilliantly within a majestic but cracked underwater complex. For hours I was satisfied to stroll through the world and soak up the rich atmosphere.

The grotesque genetic modifications common among the remaining Rapture survivors lured me deeper into the city and drove the basic combat and defense which served as my only interactions with most of those survivors. As I collected Adam and Eve, the two substances used in the genetic upgrades, I modified my own body and grew in both power and versatility.

That the game boils down to these simple combat interactions is its ultimate failing. There are only three persons in the world of Rapture with whom I could interact meaningfully. Andrew Ryan, the creator of Rapture, insulted me over my radio, sent his underlings to kill me, and ultimately proved me the lesser man. Atlas, resistance fighter and nemesis to Ryan, kindly asked me to join his side and fight to survive and escape from Rapture. And Sander Cohen, a demented and cruel artist who trapped me and enlisted me in the creation of a mixed media assembly.

The last of these, Sander Cohen, is the height of the game's vision. After carrying out the assassinations required for his art, Sander rewarded me with some resources, and turned his back to me. I had a clear choice. I could let him live or I could kill him, and my role within the game told me that killing him was not only the rational choice but the correct moral choice. So I shot him in the back, and ultimately destroyed him.

I actually felt good about that, and truly understood why BioShock is so highly regarded.

Later, when I finally dealt with Ryan, the game reached another climax -- but did not end. While that confrontation had clearly been a primary goal all along, my character's motivation beyond that point is weak to the point of irrelevance. The game finishes with a contrived scavenger hunt, a Sister's Keeper mission, and a boss battle that was as uninspired and simple as the rest of the game had seemed complex.

BioShock delivers an unforgettable experience. Ultimately my disappointment with it stems from its failure to live up to the promise of its premise.

(Image credit: This amazing thread of alternate cover art.)

More than 600 PlayStation Demo Discs

2009-01-27T16:48:00.004-05:00

This is not my not-auction (nor the not-auction of anyone I know) but given my interest in demo discs, it amuses me:
At first I thought 635 demos probably included too many PC demos to be reasonable, but that's actually not the concern. The concern is that many, many of these are repeats. Rare or not, asking $2000 for this is pretty brave. Maybe there really is a collector willing to drop that kind of dough on redundancy.

Or maybe the rares in this set add up to over $2000 and the seller is hoping to find a reseller who wants to take the time to resell the rares separately.

Guess I'm not the only one...

2009-01-27T09:04:00.004-05:00

For a long time when I'd see the game title "Nobunaga's Ambition", I'd read it in my head as "Nobunga's Ambition". Eventually I took the time to read the title more carefully.

Someone at Sony has similar reading comprehension problems:

And...it's fixed! WITNESS THE POWER OF CURMUDGEON GAMER.

Retail stores require DRM?

2009-01-21T11:01:00.001-05:00

From Inside Mac Games News' quote of Sports Interactive's Miles Jacobson from an interview at VideoGamer.com:

Sports Interactive studio director Miles Jacobson recently spoke with VideoGamer.com about the problem of game piracy.
...
'I don't know whether there is a proper cure for piracy without a change in society, to be honest. There needs to be some kind of copy protection in your product otherwise retail aren't going to stock your product, so we do have to take some measures.'

That's the sentence from IMG's liberal quote that struck me the hardest. Is that accurate? Will stores not stock games without DRM? I wonder why this hasn't come up more during conversations about iTunes and DRM.

When asked about the 90 per cent piracy rate that Beautiful Game Studios has confirmed rival product Championship Manager suffers, Jacobson replied: 'It sounds about right to me.'

Wow. I mean, I know I played more pirated games than paid when I had a C=64, but I keep ignoring how bad the issue must be. I wonder what games would have WoW like sales if the DRM was as slick as theirs (ie, keep crucial portions of the game on the server, which is easier to protect -- and yes, like Steam).

Cheat Code for Beating Activision Support Hotline

2009-01-06T20:17:00.003-05:00

So I have Guitar Hero: World Tour for my PS3, but the guitar has been a bust. It worked very briefly and now doesn't work at all.

So I set up an RMA through the customer support, which went quite smoothly. The guy I spoke with was friendly and helpful. He was amused that his support script kept defaulting to PS2 when he entered PS3, and joked good naturedly about it.

Today I got an email with my RMA shipping label, but it says I'm only returning the dongle. Since that seemed odd -- I thought I was returning dongle and guitar -- I called back to clarify.

However, the lady I reached at the same number I used the night before said I now had to go through Activision's support number where I could speak with a real person about my question. That one, incidentally, is not toll free.

So I fired up my cell phone to use all those free minutes I don't ever use and called the 310-255-2050 support number.

After working through all the automated menus, I hadn't managed to find anything that actually kicked me to a real person. If you so much as hint that you're calling about Guitar Hero: World Tour, you're sent off to automated response purgatory.

Even my usual trick of hitting 0 (zero) while the system was waiting for a response didn't get me anywhere. In fact, the system eventually apologized for not knowing what I wanted and hung up on me.

After trying for 20 minutes to find a real person in this choose-your-own-adventure maze, I had an idea. I got myself into one of the automated responses on how to get my guitar working and simply said:

"operator"

That was it. Just say that word and you get transferred to a real person.

Granted, the first time I did this, I got sent to someone who appeared to hang up or press the wrong button on their phone. After that, I was in some sort of voice mail system.

I hung up, redialed, and pulled the same trick. (Saying "operator" at the other menus didn't seem to work. You have to get down to an actual support recording, not a menu.) And it worked again and I spoke with a nice guy who assured me that I should just return the dongle now and if that didn't work then my warranty would cover me for returning the guitar too later.

We'll see.

But there's your support telephone menu cheat code. Just say "operator".

Analyzing the Downloadable Game Racket

2009-01-05T20:17:00.004-05:00

Ryan over at GamerBytes has a pretty awesome pair of articles on the top selling games on XBLA (here) and PSN (here).

I recommend them. Here's a quote I particularly liked:

From various sources we can see that despite some quality games coming out from smaller developers, like RooGoo and Shred Nebula, they're not selling. They can't get their name out there, and nobody is taking the time to give these games a go.
Go and have a look at the US PlayStation blog - they have done a fantastic job allowing smaller developers, like the people behind high Velocity Bowling, PAIN, SuperSonic Automatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars and NovaStrike to speak directly to the community and give them a chance to convince the people. Interviews with Major Nelson are nice, but that's not enough.

Of all the stuff Sony's screwed up in the past couple of years, the PS Blog is one of their triumphs. I don't read it a lot, but they do a decent job of keeping true exclusive announcements for themselves. That increases visibility and readership tremendously, I'd imagine.

Anyway, the articles are a decent read.

Disclosure: I have written pro bono for GamerBytes and the parent company (Think Services) also owns Gamasutra, for whom I write monthly.

The Other Side

2008-12-30T11:00:00.003-05:00

Eurogamer's crew put Tomb Raider: Underworld at #19 on its list of 2008's top games. I rated it a stinker. Comments like these I simply cannot understand:

Kristan Reed: [...] By building on the more exploratory approach of Anniversary and giving the series the best game engine by a mile, Crystal Dynamics delivered what amounts to the first 'proper' new Tomb Raider since 1999's Last Revelation. Apart from that ridiculous swimming bit near the beginning, it's got everything you want in a Lara game - great controls, taxing puzzles and oodles of atmosphere.

Yes. EVERYTHING you want in a Lara game.

Simon Parkin: Some critics have misconstrued Underworld's precision and polish for soullessness and yes, there are times when the design's meticulous order robs its world of credibility. But really this is a game of supreme competence, executed by a developer that understands its heroine and the laws of her universe in full.

I never understood Lara, I suppose, since I missed the whole brooding, harpy Lara who misses her dear lost Mommy from the original games.

John Walker: The entire world has gone bats*** insane. Look at the reviews for this, and the reviews for the dreadful Prince of Persia, and then bang your head against a wall until you're dead. This is the best Tomb Raider has ever been, and I'm losing my mind over people's false memories of the original games, and the lack of recognition for the astonishing architecture and puzzle design here. It's epic. The story is complete toss, which is a colossal shame after Legend set things up so nicely. But this is a game about solving puzzles the size of hillsides while fluidly and beautifully leaping about. That POP could get higher review scores while being so loathsomely stupid as to be a series of tediously connected boss fights, and Tomb Raider could have the balls to include not one single boss encounter but instead replace them with elaborate and ingenious challenges and not get championed, makes me want to set fire to all of gaming.

I think this is where I diverge from the traditional gaming culture. Punishing games with cheap design simply don't entertain me like games with stories and character and mechanics that allow me to enjoy the flow instead of repeat it ad nauseum.

Also, I am pretty frustrated with IGN's review of Super Stardust Portable. I think the game is brilliant, because it achieves much of the same challenge on the PSP that you can find on the PS3, with suitable modifications. Having gone back to the PS3 version for a bit before leaving for the holidays, I realized that Portable is in fact a far different game. Still exciting and brilliant, but different.

So I was annoyed to read:

If you're a hardcore Super Stardust HD player, Super Stardust Portable will feel totally alien to you. If you're trying this out for the first time, things won't be as tough but the game is still very clearly designed around different hardware -- it just wasn't made for the PSP. If you can get by these restrictions, you'll enjoy the download, but veterans beware.

This simply was not true for me. The fact that I was (in my own eyes) a veteran SSHD player meant that I was more disposed to understand and work with the adaptations, not fight against them. I knew it couldn't be the same as the PS3 game, embraced the differences, and found a gem of a game.

The folks that I see as the traditional gaming critics and I have somehow parted ways in the past year. I'm not sure what changed. I don't think it's that I'm more casual or hardcore -- my goals and sense of enjoyment have changed, and my taste in games accordingly.

Review: Super Stardust Portable (PSP)

2008-12-23T23:07:00.002-05:00

Super Stardust HD is one of the finest PlayStation 3 games ever made. Yes, it looks like pure eyecandy, but the gripping, seat-of-your-pants gameplay stands the test of time. I recently commented that Space Invaders Extreme is to the original what Tempest 2000 was to Tempest, and I'm tempted to compare SSHD to Asteroids. Honestly, that's the wrong comparison. It is a new Robotron: 2084 for the HD generation.

When I heard the Super Stardust HD developer, Housemarque, was making a PSP version I laughed out loud. How do you condense a two-joystick game with countless objects on the screen at any given moment onto a handheld with only one analog nub (not even a stick!) and far reduced RAM and CPU capabilities? "Madness!" I thought, "It will look and play terribly."

I was wrong. (Regular readers no doubt are used to that by now.) In fact, it is now one of the finest PSP games I've ever played.

The second joystick -- used for shooting -- is handled with the four right buttons, used as a directional pad, but that's just the obvious bit. The brilliant part is that tapping a direction will generate a wide spread of random shots. The gold melter, which is one of the key weapons to master, will fire out a pleasing sinusoidal wave using this tapping approach, mimicking just the way I use it in the PS3 version. And holding down all four buttons (not difficult, in my experience) will fire the melter in a swift circular pattern -- again, just as I've used it many times in the other version.

Graphically, the game gives the appearance of handling enough objects that it really doesn't matter if falls short of the PS3's billions. Everything looks beautiful, and I'd say it's one of the better demonstrations of the PSP's abilities. One important difference here is that the spherical play surface in the original has been replaced with a spherical-looking background image and a toroidal playfield. (The use of a torus to give the illusion of a sphere is a trick I last saw in Tetrisphere on the Nintendo 64.)

The only quibble, and it's not difficult once you learn to cope, is that weapon selection is on the D-pad. That's awkward, and I'd make a couple of suggestions to improve it. First, there should be a way to map the D-pad directions to a particular weapon; for example, I should be able to make up select the rock crusher, right the gold melter, and down the ice splitter. This would eliminate some of the frustration. The final direction could be used as a cycler, or (better) a means of selecting the most upgraded weapon currently available.

The pacing has been tweaked a bit to make accomodate the adjustments in the controls. The result is a game which has kept me in awe for a solid week, and shows no intention of slowing down. I've sunk over 6 hours into this version already, and that was during a busy week when I've also been playing BioShock and doing holiday chores. (For comparison, I have well over 12 hours in the PS3 game.)

I've realized, in the meantime, that Robotron: 2084 was ultimately the correct comparison. After all, one of my favorite versions of that classic arcade game is on a handheld. The Atari Lynx version of Robotron: 2084 uses just a D-pad and two firing buttons, but still has a very clever solution to the independent firing problem that impresses me to this day: the two buttons are used to rotate a constant stream of shots while the D-pad handles movement.

Winners 2008

2008-12-21T15:29:00.004-05:00

With the stinkers out of the way, time for the good stuff.

Enjoyable games of 2008, in no particular order:

Prince of Persia (PS3) - Beautiful story, entertaining action. (review)
Burnout Paradise (PS3) - Adrenaline distilled (and downloadable).
PixelJunk Monsters (PS3/PSN) - Cute twist on Tower Defense.
Super Stardust Portable (PSP/PSN) - Brilliant port of the PS3 classic.
Stuntman: Ignition (PS3) - Everything the original should have been, with sweet graphics. (comments)
Dead Space (PS3) - An excellent first try at survival action. (discussion)
God of War: Chains of Olympus (PSP) - Tiny K looks and plays incredibly well on the PSP screen. (review)
Professor Layton and the Curious Village (NDS) - Adorable story and another master lesson in how to use a touch screen effectively. (review)
Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 (PSP) -Second entry is just as addictive as the first.
Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds (PS3) - Everything addictive about the PSP series, and a slick new take on shot timing.
The Last Guy (PS3/PSN) - Play "Snake" on real satellite photos and save the world one person at a time. Morbid and funny.
Space Invaders Extreme (PSP) - This is to Space Invaders what Tempest 2000 was to Tempest ... but moreso.
Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection (PSP/PS2) - Preserving the beauty (and addictiveness) of pinball for a whole new generation. (Wii version review by JohnH)
Impossible Mission (NDS) - Basic port of the original, but still fun. (review)
Metal Gear Solid 4 (PS3) - Fans like me get the story and the action. Most people would just get the action. Regardless, a fun final chapter. (Note: MGS3 is still the best in the series.)

It's difficult to pick a game of the year, because it depends on what you want from a game.

Best experience of the year is definitely Prince of Persia.

Best play is definitely Burnout Paradise.

Best handheld game ... this is the hard one ... I'll go with Professor Layton. Still, you can't really go wrong with Super Stardust Portable, Space Invaders Extreme, or God of War.

What a great year. Here's hoping 2009 can keep up the pace, and so can I.

(Addendum: I'm currently playing BioShock. It still has time to make the list, I suppose.)

Stinkers 2008

2008-12-20T16:42:00.003-05:00

I played some great games this year. I'll talk about those later. (Now posted: Winners 2008.)

Here is my list of Stinkers 2008, games I'd rather have skipped and saved my money and time. Not all are 2008 releases, obviously.

In no particular order:

Devil May Cry 4 (PS3) - I gave up after I vanquished the giant frog boss with glowing lesbian nymphs antennae. Pretty game, but crap otherwise.
Assassin's Creed (PS3) - Replacing Metroid Prime as my go-to insomnia cure. Boring and washed out.
Mercenaries 2 (PS3) - The original was GTA in a warzone -- and fun. This was just stupid.
Mirror's Edge (PS3) - Clever mechanic but needlessly unpleasant. Focus on the fun, next time. (review)
LEGO Star Wars II: The Original Trilogy (PSP) - People really enjoyed this? And people griped that Prince of Persia was repetitive. Sheesh.
NovaStrike (PS3) - As pedestrian as a top-down shooter can get. But it has trophies!
PixelJunk Eden (PS3) - Fertilizing abstract flowers is more work than fun.
Twisted Metal: Head On Extra Twisted Edition (PS2) - High production values, but ultimately no fun. Watch the lost cut-scenes on YouTube and save your dough.
Hotel Dusk: Room 215 (NDS) - Yawn.
The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass (NDS) - My annual "try to like Zelda games" fling. After a brief honeymoon I realized how long of a slog it would be to finish, how repetitive the dungeons seemed, and how much I wanted to spend my time elsewhere.
Tomb Raider: Underworld (PS3) - I debated about whether to put this one on the list, but I think it was a grand disappointment. Shows promise, but that's not enough. (review)

Ok, that's enough. I'll get around to the good games soon.

A Simple Rule for PS3 Installs

2008-12-19T21:31:00.003-05:00

If my DualShock 3 turns itself off automatically while waiting for your game to install, you have a problem. Fix it. I'm looking at you, BioShock.

While I'm on it, another rule: if the patch for your game is 4GB or larger, the game should be sold on the PSN storefront, like Burnout Paradise, just for convenience. I'm looking at you, Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds.

Hear it in Liberty City, buy it in your own.

2008-12-16T19:03:00.001-05:00

From Reuters:

One [Amazon mp3 store integration] allowed gamers playing 'Grand Theft Auto IV' to tag songs in the soundtrack for later purchase on Amazon.

That's slick. It's all about the APIs, baby.

Review: Prince of Persia (PS3)

2008-12-16T18:23:00.003-05:00

The new Prince of Persia tells the story a young woman and a young man who fall in love with each other, battle an evil force that threatens their world, and ultimately pay dearly for the choices they make.

When I walked the final steps to the conclusion of the game, I realized that more than any game in recent memory I was the character on the screen. The hours of conversation between the handsome, plucky Prince (a commoner with a fancy nickname) and his legitimately royal foil, the lively Princess Elika, had had their intended effect.

I was the Prince, and he was I. I knew what I had to do. I knew why I had to do it. I knew there would be dire consequences, and I felt a moment of uncertainty.

In that moment, I considered turning off the console, removing the disc, putting it away. Yet I could not -- I could no more avoid my fate any more than the Prince could avoid his. So the Prince and I did what had to be done. The final images of the game I shall not soon forget.

Surrounding the tale is an action game for casual players. The Prince and Elika move through a beautiful, intricate fantasy world via rhythmic acrobatic challenges, what I think of as Parappa parkour. Except for one moment near the climax, honed reflexes are not really required for the jumping and running. Combat is simple pattern recognition and interruption combined with improvisation using an elaborate -- but friendly -- combo system.

As I said, it's for casual players: you can't die, it uses a type of magic cursor to guide you when you're lost, and the autosave system is always keeping track of your progress. All the frustrations have been removed so you can enjoy the game's story and its satisfying movement challenges.

Don't go into this game expecting it to be Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It is not -- and never was intended as -- a modern version of that classic. This is a brand new experience with new challenges and a story that grownups can appreciate.

Home - Sony's investment in failure

2008-12-11T11:22:00.002-05:00

Today Sony allows the general PlayStation 3-owning public to get into PlayStation Home, its virtual world.

I see two possibilities here:

Apathy - Most people don't know about -- or care about -- PlayStation Home. This is the best case scenario for Sony.
Hatred - Sony forces some popular games to incorporate Home in an essential way, and people hate it. Reviewers will comment on how the Xbox 360 version of a game doesn't include such stupid features. Players will complain about having to use it. This is the bad scenario.

Frankly, I think Home is one of the biggest boondoggles we've ever seen in the industry. Aside from that whole $600 PlayStation 3 thing, of course.

I wish Sony had used its money to seed unique, exclusive games for its online service. That would have been a lot more interesting, and would have improved its image both among consumers, developers, and publishers.

REVIEW: Civilization Revolution DS

2008-12-04T21:55:00.000-05:00

The novelty of being able to play Civilization on a pocket-sized device got to me, and I bought Civilization Revolution for my DS. The result is rather good, excellent even, but it also suffers from a number of irritating little lacks, lacks that result from the developers not taking the DS version seriously.

Let's do the DS stuff first, and talk about Civilization Revolution itself, as a game divorced from platform, later. It's a major point in the DS version's favor that, although it lacks the Civilopedia, that massive database of information on everything in the game, and scoreboard support, it is an essentially-complete version of the game. As far as the core gameplay is concerned, it has been crippled in no way by being for the DS. The DS version of Civilization Revolution is, basically, the same game as that for the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3. It uses the same game rules (a simplified mix from across all four Civilization games), it has the same four victory conditions, and the same punishing A.I. drives the computer players.

And why shouldn't it be the same game? The DS is not an underpowered piece of hardware, compared to many systems. It's much more muscular than the Gameboy Advance, and that handled Advance Wars 2 with style. It turns out that, in Japan, the Super Famicom got a release of the original Civilization, and that's on a processor clocked at less than 2 mHz. These are turn-based strategy games, which are not known for tiring out a processor unless it's high-level chess or something similarly insane. If the core logic of a Civilization game is demanding enough that it requires a Cell processor to make it run then frankly I don't think I'd want to play it. Let's keep the difficulty level within the realm of human ability, hm?

In one respect the DS version is better than the 360 and PS3 versions. Because it's a portable system, no one expects it to have great graphics, so visually the game has been graphically regressed to Civ 1 style. And to that let me add: it's about time!

Isometric tiles and 3D interfaces may look great, but they're really fancier than a Civilization game has to be, a feature to sucker people into buying it who have no real idea what Civilization is about, and probably have no business playing it anyway. This is a game series that, even from the first version, was pushing it concerning control complexity. Adding in visual clutter was ill-advised. "Normal" players might be drawn to the game by the visuals, but the players who are really serious about Civilization will want to keep the display as simple as possible. And the DS version of the game does this pretty well. Screenshots of the 360 and PS3 versions reveal that the graphics in those versions has been given a thick coat of fluorescent paint. Oh well, at least it's not gray and brown.

The primary advantages of the DS version are simplified display and holy cow porta-Civ. These are huge benefits, enough that, if done perfectly this could have been the version of Civilization Revolution to own. It seems it was hard for the developers to believe because there is ample evidence they viewed the DS version as a throwaway project. There are a few notable lacks that, while I'm not sure they're not similarly lacking in the other versions, I doubt it.

One of the most surprising has to do with an outright error in the inexcusably-poor manual. It claims that on the easiest difficulty the requirements for winning are relaxed, but this is completely false: I've played several Chieftain-level games, and none of them has ended early.

Second, although they tried to make the interface DS-ish by using the second screen a bit (and having a a battle display obviously inspired by Advance Wars), I'd much rather have that screen used to provide an overview map of the known world. There is no way to get a view zoomed out any more than the normal view. It's infuriating, especially since the game is obviously capable of displaying a zoomed-out map: it uses just such a map to show the game history movie at the end! (That movie, by the way, is itself buggy and inaccurate with nation borders. Did this game get put through QA or not?)

As mentioned before, leaderboards are not supported in the DS version of the game. But why? The end-of-game score list ranks the player on what looks very much like a vanity board, but it doesn't persist; the next time you play, your game will be ranked against the same list of default names. Considering that the first time the game is turned on it spends several minutes erasing an epic amount of EEPROM storage, it seems laughable that they couldn't spare a few hundred of those bytes to implement a real score list.

One particularly galling lack amounts to the only gameplay difference between the versions that I can see, but strangely it has nothing to do with system power. I've not played the other versions in order to verify, but cross-platform reviews remark that the DS version is lacking the ability to sell units for gold. Why this might be missing, of all features, I have no idea. It's as if they simply forgot to add that button to the game. I suspect that whatever reason they might give would be an incredibly poor one.

There's a UI flaw that I find consistently annoying. After a unit's last move is used, the game will instantly scroll the map over to the next unit to be moved, even if there was something more you could have done with the previous unit. This is really obnoxious when you want to have a settler build a city before an enemy unit captures it. Also, when a unit with automatic moves lined up gets its turn, it moves immediately; those moves aren't queued for the end of the turn. This gives the player a reduced chance to stop it if he wishes the movement to be aborted.

Another bugs that crops up from time to time involves the Oxford University Wonder of the World. When built, it's supposed to grant the player a random advanced technology. The computer players go for it fairly reliably on higher difficulties, but when the human player goes for it, something like half the time, upon completion, it vanishes, replaced by a nearly-useless SDI Defense building. When this happens the Wonder completion message fails to appear , and apparently the player doesn't get credit for it, although it does disappear from the Wonders-to-be-built selection. Whether this is intentional or not isn't explained by the (again, woefully inadequate) manual, and I have no idea if it happens in other versions, but even if it is somehow planned behavior, the very least the lack of feedback to the player that it has happened is infuriating.

All this may sound like I'm griping. And I am, dammit, none of these limitations are excusable. But the game itself is still marvelously addictive. In the couple of months I've had it I've played dozens of games, and it's yet to get old. In all, Civilzation Revolution is one of the best versions of Civilization. It might lack some of the epic sweep of other versions, but as a pick-up-and-play game that can be completed in an afternoon it's excellent. And the DS version, played on a portable, is well-suited towards just that scale of experience. It's a shame that the developers didn't have that vision for the game, because with a better UI this could well have been an Advance Wars killer. Even the game's bugs and maddening limitations can't quite diminish the brilliance here. It is just really nice to play.

Review: Tomb Raider: Underworld (PS3)

2008-12-03T19:57:00.006-05:00

Strictly as an exploration game, Tomb Raider: Underworld falls short of the standard set by the original Tomb Raider. However, it does provide a better run/jump/climb experience than either of its immediate predecessors, Tomb Raider: Legend and Tomb Raider Anniversary. Regrettably, that's about all it does competently.

Each of the last three games has a key strength: Legend provided a strong characterization of Lara, Anniversary was exceptional for its story and level design (which leans heavily on the original), and Underworld gives us the skilled Lara we've been waiting for ever since Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time opened the door to the new generation of acrobatic platforming. If Lara has another adventure -- and I'm not convinced she should -- the designers would be well-advised to keep the Lara of Underworld. She really is a joy to watch, and not just for her curves and slinky attire.

When I played Anniversary I felt that the designers had not taken enough liberties with the original material. When I see the opportunity offered by Underworld go wasted, I wonder if the designers simply aren't up to the task of creating compelling worlds.

Here's the problem in a nutshell: the original Tomb Raider was built out of large, dense levels, dominated by a giant structure which Lara needed to approach in several different ways. Underworld goes for gigantic levels with lots of wasted space.

The Sphinx level from Tomb Raider is the easiest example, although the Obelisk of Khamoon, St. Francis' Folly, and The Colosseum would serve just as well. Within minutes of emerging on top of the Sphinx, Lara sees ledges and doors which cry out to be explored. Looking up, you wonder if she can find a way on top of the beast's head. Eventually, each of these is visited, figured out, and bested. Despite the grand scale each level had a special intimacy, a sense of discovering and mastering a whole sequence of devious riddles which fit together like a tightly-packed mechanical watch.

By contrast the levels in Underworld are needlessly gigantic and boring, as if size alone would make them better. Instead of seeing obvious signposts around you, leading you onward to deeper and darker secrets, Lara's Underworld consists of desolate, uninteresting expanses with tiny oases of adventure connected by long hallways or jungle roads. The motorcycle that Lara straddles for half the game -- yes, half the game! -- is proof that the levels are anything but tight, fun experiences. Truly, the best moments of the game, when you first see and later scale a giant mechanical tower of stone, recall precisely the design of the original. They feel out of place compared to everything else in Underworld.

In the final level of the game the designers commit an unpardonable sin: they go from a set number of enemy creatures per level to respawning enemies. The difficulty goes way up, but not in a way consonant with the game's other challenges: running, jumping, and climbing. Perhaps I should have shelved the game, given the frustration this section caused me, but I felt the need to finish even in the face of cowardly tricks.

I'm willing to excuse modestly clumsy design if the story is top notch, but Underworld has no such saving grace. Amusingly, the designers have replaced Lara the cipher of the original game (often derided for being zero- or one-dimensional) with Lara the smoldering, resentful harpy who misses her dear, lost Mommy. She yells and threatens and glowers, hoping the noise will distract you from the stupidity of it all. Sure, you can claim there's more detail to this Lara, but you just can't bring yourself to care.

On top of that, the writers have attempted an embarrassingly amateur Grand Unified Theory of World Mythology. You'll laugh out loud more than once at the blithering stupidity Lara mutters for her little recording device.

Reportedly the original Tomb Raider developers, Core Design, wanted to make a grand trilogy starting with the ill-fated Angel of Darkness. Crystal Dynamics has pulled off a trilogy in four years, which is quite an accomplishment. I am impressed that Crystal Dynamics pulled the thread of the original game's story and wove it together with the seemingly separate thread from Legend, all leading to a tidy resolution in Underworld. It's quite a trick, but ultimately nothing more.

Note: I experienced two hard lockups while playing this game. Each required me to power cycle my PS3.

More Words You Are Not Allowed To Use In Your Game

2008-12-03T01:34:00.003-05:00

Continued from previously. Again, include all cognates. Again, exceptions as listed.

Infect (if you're referring to bacteria then you get a pass, otherwise....)

Assimilate (in all Borg-ish contexts, so Grand Theft Auto IV is allowed to use this, but you are not)

World (the only exception here is World of Goo)

Light (especially when prefixed by the word "of")

Demonic (Unless you've read all, and I mean every freaking word, of the Divine Comedy. If you're gonna throw this around, you'd better know what it means.)

Angelic (We are equal opportunity snarkers.)

Chosen (Especially if it's unclear who's supposed to be doing the choosing. Pervasive, subtle personification of God/destiny/fate is a disease, and I'm the cure.)

Ninja (Exceptions granted if your ninjas are obviously from the Japanese culture. Of Earth, not Generic Fantasyland.)

Portal (Unless your game is named it.)