We sat down with Society co-founder and game developer Miguel Sternberg of Spooky Squid Games to discuss the local scene, indie games and a wide variety of other topics. You can download his games via his website (they are freeware) and be sure to check out more information about the Hand Eye Society.

We also may discuss the many deaths of Ian, which does include the following gem below.

One of the most epic deaths of Ian, the Storm Trooper Firing Squad

Questions and comments can be sent to podcast@leftstickright.com

Yes, it is that time of year again. All of the LeftStickRight crew has assembled for the Gaming Expo portion of the Fan Expo in Toronto. With all kinds of vendors showing off their wares, we spend the first Fan Cast discussing the finer points of motion controlled games. Kinect and Playstation Move are on display and we are move than happy to pick them apart piece by piece.

Seriously, though, you should listen. It was an interesting day.

Questions, comments and motion controllers can be sent to podcast@leftstickright.com

This one is a week old, but let’s give a big birthday wish to Ian Y! Our gift to him was a Sunday away from mixer equipment.

Games discussed include Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days, Dragon Quest IX: Sentinel of the Starry Skies, Mafia II and DeathSpank.

Questions can be sent to podcast@leftstickright.com

Unfortunately, the only massage I enjoyed in Enjoy Your Massage! was the one I gave my temples to ease the headache of wasting 500 Wii Points.

Enjoy Your Massage! is a misleading title, to begin with. At no time are you yourself ever on the table. They should’ve called it Enjoy Giving Other People Massages!, but I guess that doesn’t appeal to our self-centered culture.

The game has you working as an up-and-coming masseuse for Giselle, owner of a beauty farm. No, that isn’t some strange mistranslation. “Beauty farms” exist; I looked it up. Why would women so self-conscious of their appearance as to spend extravagant amounts on high-end treatment go to a place called a “farm”? Beats me. That’s probably why I’m still single: I ask too many damn questions.

There are six female clients to pamper, each introduced through anime still-frames. It reminds me a bit of Trauma Center, only if Derek Stiles wasn’t saving lives but doing boob jobs on Rodeo Drive (“Doctor! The patient is flat-chesting! Inject more saline now!”). Oddly, the camera sneaks uncontrollably inward toward each client as they introduce themselves, as though your eyes are telescoping out of your head or you’re slowly being pulled into their orbit. This is the crucial first step of masseuse client-relations: making each other feel equally uncomfortable.

This initial creepiness, thankfully, disappears as soon as you begin the game itself, only to be replaced by a wholly heightened and unprecedented form of creepiness once you realize your lone goal is to play Simon on the backs of women. Seriously. Each client’s back is divided into a 9-square grid, as if they had fallen asleep on top of a giant, hot Rubik’s cube. These squares will light up for you in a certain sequence — accompanied by a piano note — that you are asked to copy through point and click. Get it right and your client’s satisfaction meter goes up one notch. Mess it up and it drops two. Empty the meter or run out of time and you lose. Fill the meter and you win. That’s really all there is to it. There’s not even a freeplay mode where you can try to plunk out “Mary Had a Little Lamb” on your organic harpsichord.

The ESRB rates the game as having “mildly suggestive themes,” but they could say the same for Murder, She Wrote for all I know. All you ever see is bare backs, and even they have an offputting, plasticy sheen to them. The only action that takes place is your pair of stiff, disembodied hands giving little wuss-rubs to each square on a woman’s back, releasing happy winged guardian masks from Super Mario Bros. 2. In fact, the hands never even bend or move their fingers. You could basically recreate any of the scenes in this game by drawing on a Barbie’s back with a red Sharpie and tapping about it with a lopped off pair of Ken hands. If that sounds mildly suggestive to you, you might want to consider some professional help there, Dexter.

You’re not going to find much suggestiveness anywhere else, either. You are rewarded, in typical fanservice fashion, with an image of each client, but nearly all are almost fully encased in clothing — only the last is wearing a bikini that doesn’t leave everything to the imagination. It’s not really “a sultry peek” as much as if you just stumbled across the clients during their daily routines and shared an awkward, silent (the music stops) moment. “Hi. It’s me, you know? The set of disembodied hands that played random notes on your back? Yeah, that pair! So, uh… guess I’ll see ya around!”

I suppose if you really felt the need, you could try to find something suggestive in the game’s typo-laden and repetitive dialogue. “Maybe a massage will help me feeling better,” Ines says. Oh, Ines! That sounds almost mildly saucy if I imagine you with a cockney accent! And if you’re expecting a happy ending, just forget it; there’s none to be had. Really, there is literally no ending to the game; it just dumps you back at the selection screen after the final client.

So what I’m really trying to say is…

If you came to Enjoy Your Massage! hoping to unlock your magic touch and apply it toward wooing a true love, I am afraid to say the realm of video games has disappointed us yet again. If, however, you came looking for an overly simple repetition game in a cheaply made and socially awkward shell, you’ve found your soul mate! On the bright side, at least nothing exists yet called Enjoy Your Ashiatsu Massage! where you use the Balance Board to walk on the backs of flabby American businessmen.

Enjoy Your Massage! was developed by MicroForum and is currently available on WiiWare for 500 Wii Points. Review based on full release of game after approximately 1 hour of attention. For those curious enough, there is actually a racier-looking version of this game, but I think I’ll just stick with flowers from now on, thank you.

At some point a dog enters the room. This is not uncommon.

Games discussed include: Alan Wake, DeathSpank, Hitman: Codename 47, Hitman 2: Silent Assassin and Hitman: Blood Money

Questions about the glaring omission of Hitman games can be sent to podcast@leftstickright.com

From our discussion, Billy made sure to point out that he had been playing the game almost exclusively single player during his time with it. He maintained that the game was much more serious and objective based when you were sitting down with a set of headphones zoned in on your play. Coop was more for fun and having good times with your friends, but the challenge offered by the single player experience would be very different. I thought I’d give it a try – taking on the game at the mid-range difficulty and gauging how the game would pan out with just that.

Okay, this is about to get intense

What I found was a mixed bag of experiences. Crackdown 2 is at its core centered around progression of skills through various challenges. The more you do something, the better your character will become at performing that exact task. If you like running and jumping off tall buildings, leaping around like some super-powered parkour professional than you will find solace in collecting Agility Orbs scattered throughout the city, each one moving you closer to running and jumping faster and higher. If you would rather spend your time knocking around bad guys with your fists, pistols or grenades you will find each of those approaches have their own skillset that are enhanced by performing those tasks, allowing you to lift cars and throw them across city blocks or shoot a rocket that destroys a legion of enemy vehicles. The latest skill is useful for those willing to take hairpin turns, street race for glory and generally mow down lines of bad people in vehicles not suited for such activities. Increasing your driving skill unlocks better cars and allows better control of what you’re doing on the road.

The progression of these skills at the beginning is the driving force to the entire game. Sure there is a story – the population of Pacific City are being terrorized by an extremist faction by day and a zombie plague by night – but what you really want to do is cause chaos and collect orbs. Getting only a few kills or a few orbs at the beginning levels you up and give you a quick demonstration of what will happen should you continue to take the path of gathering experience. The missions will offer marginal benefits, such as reducing the amount of annoying bad guys that get in your way along specific orb-rich avenues and also providing drop points to grab vehicles and weaponry, but this constant moving forward in collecting and destroying is the meat of the experience. The problem with this is that the progression begins to slow down very fast.

By the power of greyskull... I have the Chrysler!

Once you have hit level 4 or so on each of the skill levels the ability to reach the next level becomes exponentially more difficult. While I still have a penchant for the obsessive collection of Agility Orbs, as you move forward in the game I feel more restricted by some of the control limitations. Agility in the game is all about timing and gauging how far you can jump so that you can find the best route to the green glowing bits. It is also about picking the best way to scale large buildings – finding the right edges to grab on to and the right angle to leap off. This becomes a big issue later into the game when you are scaling large structures, jumping to a ledge only to find that it wasn’t a ledge at all. Sure, it looked like a ledge and it may have even talked like an edge, but it was for whatever reason made of teflon and you will slide down to the bottom of the building and possibly to your death. Sometimes this is true even for ledges you have just grabbed, where when you fall that same ledge that saved you is no longer able to be gripped and then you plummet to your death.

The same is true for the progression of many of the other skills. The strength skill – which is enhanced through the act of punching dudes and throwing heavy objects at dudes – is hindered significantly by the inability to lock on to an enemy and use a melee attack. Only weaponry can be used when you have locked on to an assailant, so the process of stopping that and then attacking the enemy is almost too much at points when you are surrounded. I tended to favour guns for that specific reason, and even using almost guns exclusively still did not warrant the full level of progression well into the main game.

When I reached the point that the level progression had slowed and I wanted to shift my attention the more structured objective-based component of the game. The unfortunate lack of depth therein settled in quickly. I had done a few missions on and off when they came my way, including collecting audio logs and stunt missions when I felt compelled, but the main story is composed of a few simple tasks. The first is eliminating a set of enemies on a platform and standing in a specific location while a machine powers up. Once this has been completed three times a dungeon-like mission opens where you must defend a critical object from a continuous onslaught of zombie-like enemies until the timer winds down. While it did become monotonous, it was compelling enough to continue all the way through the game. What I didn’t expect to happen was to hit a wall very near to the end of the story that stopped me dead.

The zombie-like Freaks don't often overwhelm, but they are ugly as all get out

I had gotten to a point where progressing my skills became a long and arduous task, so I assumed my ability to complete the game even at the higher-than-normal difficulty level I had set it to would be rather simple. However, the last two dungeons that I encountered had such a vastly increased difficulty level that the constant task of restarting and trying varying tasks became too much to continue.

My single player experience ended in frustration, and that is not somewhere I like to end off generally. I can see how the game would benefit from coop play, especially when a mission has you facing a wide berth of beasts attacking from all angles with pin-point accuracy and deadly power. I enjoyed my time playing alone for the most part, but it quickly came to a point that I felt I would have been more comfortable in the company of friends or at least toning down the difficulty. I did not feel the game offered a control system that was meant to offer me a significant challenge at a moderate difficulty level, and the joy of being a Super Cop becomes tasking when you are forced to restart the same mission multiple times.

Crackdown 2 was developed by Ruffian Games and published by Microsoft. Game was provided courtesy of Microsoft. Played on the Ruthless difficulty level for 11 hours.

I have even been so bold as to consider competing in the Super Smash Bros.: Brawl tournament, one of several to be held during the show. Sure, my skills at Brawl could only be considered extraordinary in nursing home circuits and there’s a $20 fee to take part, but there’s something to be said for having the experience, right? And there are 10 million Hbc Rewards Points up for grabs! I don’t know what those are, but 10 million of them sounds like a lot and hopefully I could use them at Tim Hortons after I cross back into the States.

Then I read the tournament rules.

Well, maybe “read” is overstating it a bit. I observed all the strings of words that compose the rules, but as to comprehension, I’m not so sure. “Stage striking?” “D3 walking and standing infinites?” What is this stuff? Why are there so many rules for a game that comes with its own tournament system installed? I keep looking for terms and rules I’m familiar with, like “Don’t be a hammer-grabbing jackass.” or “When choosing Captain Falcon, always pick his pink color scheme because it’s just funny.”, but they’re nowhere to be found.

And Meta Knight is banned? Why? In my hands, Meta Knight is, at best, a flying drunk shish kebab. If there is some technique that has turned him into a vile, unbalanced force of unstoppable fury, I’ve never found it.

Worst of all, they refer to Jigglypuff as “Jiggz.” Way to make one of the cutest, most kid-focused characters sound like a porn star. Jigglypuff is a lady and should be treated as such!

As you might have figured out, I’m nowhere near the technical or experiential status of a serious tournament player. I don’t study techniques or hone combos in practice mode. When I play Brawl, I choose a character based on whims alone, attack by jabbing the buttons for one of about five different attacks I happen to have in my head at the time, and am not against stages with environmental hazards. Live by the go-kart track, die by the go-kart track.

On a “professional” level, Brawl does have a number of imbalances and ways to play that would be considered unethical or unfair to those who would desire to exploit them — and when awards are being offered, there’s always the risk that someone will.

“[W]e’ve got a great scene with no jerks,” the rulewriter states in the manifesto, “but I just want to cover my bases.” That is plenty fair, but goes to show just how different worlds exist between tournament play and some rounds with friends. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not against tournaments at all. I respect people who are willing to invest the time and study into becoming good players in this respect, but I don’t think it’s fair to consider them “superior” in many ways to an average gamer. It’s two different universes with two different tiers — and one side isn’t so concerned with their standing as long as you respect the house hammer rule.

So I’ll be looking forward to the tournaments, not as a fighter but a spectator hoping to be impressed by some finely-honed skills. Well, unless I find someone in a finely-designed Varia Suit.

Games discussed include ModNation Racers, Resonance of Fate and Dead to Rights: Retribution.

Comments, questions and presents can be thrown at podcast@leftstickright.com

Games discussed include Dragon Quest IX, Dead To Rights: Retribution, Halo 3: ODST and Resonance of Fate.

Questions, comments and complaints can be promptly sent to podcast@leftstickright.com