arne360

A weekly log of the games I’ve played accompanied by some random thoughts about them

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Lord of the Rings Online
Over the course of the day I managed to put in a few hours in LOTRO. I hit level 21 with my Lore-master doing quests, which included my first Fellowship party with one other person as we decimated Elite spiders in Minas Eriol for a quest. I think I saw my first Fellowship maneuver opportunity, but I wasn’t sure because I’ve never seen one. If it was, I totally wasted whatever it was I could do for epic win. I also have managed to accumulate over 1 gold in this time. After that I started doing low-level quests in Buckland and The Shire to hit 22 because everything else I have flagged is either to high of a level or requires a Fellowship to complete. It is nice that I can walk past a ton of level 10 mobs, right up to the item I have to retrieve as part of my quest, get it and walk right back out without a fight. With only about 9k XP left, I’ll probably hit 22 this week so I can spend some of my silver getting new Lore-master skills. Am I a nerd yet?

*****

Monday, August 18, 2008

Bionic Commando: Rearmed
Finally got a chance to try this out this week. I realized I had my NES copy of the game, but since my NES isn’t hooked up at the moment, I didn’t get any practice in before BC:R was released last week. I remember I used to be so smooth with swinging around with the bionic arm and getting through levels. I am definitely rusty. Most definitely. I defeated the first boss on my third try, that’s how sad it was. 16 minutes just to clear the level.

Lord of the Rings Online
More LOTRO. What I have become. Continued the easier quests to hit level 22 until I got greedy with a quest that required a Fellowship around level 18. Deep in the Old Forest, after a bunch of spiders, there was a big nasty Elite Haunted Barren-oak tree, with some bad tree root friends. I managed to get it down to about 24% before I died. The thing is, I was stupid. I only had one add that I could have kept indefinitely stunned or I could have kited the tree away a bit and maybe, just maybe I could have outlasted the Elite tree. Not going back to this until I am a higher level. Or with a Fellowship. Quit the session with 1.2k before level 21. All these low level quests are less than 200 XP each, so it’s slow going.

*****

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

Lord of the Rings Online
Yes, more, more, more. Soon I’ll be treated for OCD. Or be found in an Internet cafe in Korea. Hit level 22 finishing one quest and defeating random things in the Old Forest. Picked up my one new Lore-master skill (Cracked Earth) which I’ve read is useful later on and completed the requirements to get the Apprentice level for Weaponsmith. I have a bunch of recipes for Scholar and Weaponsmith that require Journeyman level. So maybe soon, after some farming. I sold some stacks of crafting components at the auction house. I also gained two new class traits–Healer and Beast-lore. Too bad I only have one more free until level 27. Anyhow, I hit my goal so I can take a break on LOTRO for now. Just occurred to me tonight that I should have been taking screenshots to go with my updates.

*****

Wednesday, August 20, 2008

Galaga Legions
Wow, this totally kicked my ass. This isn’t quite as tight or brilliant a remix as Pac-Man: Championship Edition was, but this is right up there regardless. The vintage, retro skin is where it’s at. Don’t even bother with the new or “standard” skin. Obviously I’m still struggling getting some of the game mechanics and patterns down so I can get better, but I do like the idea of side-pod guns that can you place in one of four cardinal directions whenever you want, even if they aren’t near you. This makes it feel like there is a rhythm towards clearing some of the stages because of how, where and when waves come at you. I know I’ll never get to the point where I can really maximize bonuses. Definitely going to keep playing this. I want to play more Pac-Man:Championship Edition now too.

*****

Thursday, August 21, 2008

Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Shamefully I’ve never played a Ratchet & Clank game, nor have I played the most recent iteration, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Therefore I felt a little dirty playing this episodic “sequel” of sorts–I’ll definitely have to myself the favor of grabbing the full title next week since what little I played so far was pretty fun.

Braid
I went back to Braid after a lengthy hiatus because I felt stuck and couldn’t figure out some of the puzzles. I’m still missing one puzzle piece in World 2 that I’m almost tempted to look up a solution for, but I won’t… yet. I solved the World 4-3 and then immediately got stuck and frustrated with trying to wrap my head around World 4-4 (”The Hunt”) so I gave up. Instead, I took a quick peek at World 5 and I was totally not ready for the shadow mechanics I encountered. Still managed to get a few puzzle pieces off of this one before I called it a night.

The highlight of the session was being completely stuck on World 4-3 thinking I had ruined my playthrough because I rewound too far when it turned out I had solved the puzzle by accident. One could say “eureka!” if one was old, which I am not, so I didn’t.

*****

Q.E.D.

Although I now hold a minor grudge for spoiling a specific quest I might not ever get to in Oblivion, I recommend reading Nayan’s editorial on HDRLying about story in games and the use of the unreliable narrator. It was thought provoking enough that I even passed this around to a couple people at work today. For me, the missing example here that everyone could easily relate to would be using the somewhat obvious and darling-of-everybody game for interesting story and with a unreliable narrator: Portal. Although, this might be the most accessible of examples, there are some flaws with using Portal as a concise example. The reveal and impact–and subsequent questioning of one self and one’s surroundings–aren’t as compelling as the Oblivion example. In Portal, the unreliable narrator, GLaDOS, is revealed as such far too soon. At least too soon to grow some level of trust before you realize the diabolic nature of your unseen guide and narrator.

I mentioned this to Nayan, who unfortunately hasn’t had a chance to play Portal yet. Talking a bit more, lead to the following bit of exchange:

• me: max payne is another good one.
• Nayan: Is max an unreliable narrator? there’s a lot of doubt that you see in his dreams
• Nayan: like, in Max Payne 1, you kill yourself after you kill your own family…but i always thought that was a metaphor for essentially killing your family for being married to your job
• me: if only you take it far enough to question whether his dream sequences have affected his judgement in reality.

That was just the start of it. It was nice to read something last night that got me thinking a bit more about some of the games I’ve played with, ones that I especially hadn’t considered from a more critical point of view. Even better was that Nayan’s post generated discussion between me and a few other folks about storytelling in games.

E3 2008 came and went pretty quickly this year for me. I had no activities scheduled for the show, so there wasn’t much of a reason to hang around the improved, “it’s new to you” LACC-centered E3 for me. One of the only work-related commitments was attending the Sony press conference at the Shrine Auditorium (video of the full press conference here). This was my first E3 press conference ever — I was not able to attend the Microsoft ones back when I was working on their products — so it definitely had an air of excitement and anticipation for me. Color me impressed at the degree of production that was involved.

After the press conference I headed back to the LACC to do a spot of work and run into former colleagues, journalists and friends for a couple hours. At the appointed time, I made my way over to King Taco on West Pico Boulevard to the PlayStation.blog reader meet-up. It was nice to see Jeff again — the last time was at the Sierra Spring Event back when I was working at Vivendi Games — and I brought some fancy Naughty Dog items in tow with me: a signed copy of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a “>signed promotional poster for the game and a few of our new t-shirts. It was awesome to see all the folks that turned out, including regular gamers, some community press (including PS3 Fanboy’s Andrew Yoon and Platform Nation’s Steven Artlip and even a couple people from Wal-Mart’s Check Out blog, among others) and even a few people from other developers and publishers. Alas, I didn’t bring my PSP to participate in the Hot Shots Golf: Open Tee 2 tournament.

I will echo the thanks that Jeff gave on the PlayStation.blog and thank everyone that made it out. It was great the see the turnout and kind words about the studio I now work for and it’s catalog of work.

After that, it was off to dinner and then meeting up with Howard from PopCultureShock and some other buddies for the Activision press conference. Looks like the soon to be Activision Blizzard has a nice line-up as well, based on what they showed. Afterwards, I spent some time socializing with some people I hadn’t run into earlier at the Convention Center and got a good-natured pop quiz from Forbes.com Scott Morris about how it feels like to go from publisher to developer, among a few other items, probably much to the amusement of his co-worker Mary Jane Irwin. I had to quickly make my escape (just kidding) and despite wanting to go to bed, went to the Bethesda party at the Saddle Ranch Chop House on Sunset. I’m kind of glad I did, as it seemed everybody and anybody I would want to see (since I wasn’t at E3 proper this week) was there. Fun times.

Although that was technically my only day at E3, the activities outside of it continue a little bit. I had dinner last night with Flynn and David from GayGamer.net (always a pleasure) and Honey from EA POGO at a nice little Japanese place in Little Tokyo — my first time there since coming to Los Angeles.

Tonight, I’ll be at the Joystiq reader meet-up at Mahalo in Santa Monica (with some more stuff from Naughty Dog). Feel free to drop by if you can!

It’s not often I run across someone from NeoGAF without expressly trying to meet up with them, even rarer when my reputation precedes me — what, I have a reputation?

Quite recently at my highly classified new job one of my coworkers spotted my browser open to NeoGAF and casually asked what my alias was on the board. Turns out he knows who I am on there — not a huge stretch there — and remembers reading my occasional flurry of posts back when I was representing Microsoft. Quite the interesting, yet weird moment. Too bad he wasn’t Kittonwy or Drinky Crow…

A couple of weeks ago I headed to Japan for about ten days, give or take. I don’t really write about personal (non-video gaming) subjects here on the blog, so if you want to know more about the trip, just check out my Flickr stream about the trip. On to video gaming related stuff…

My first purchases were at the Yodobashi Camera store right by Osaka Station and my hotel and included Mother 1 & 2 and Archaic Sealed Heat — which I just found out will likely be released in North America soon. Drat!

I also spotted the ultra nice gametech cases that I had been coveting for quite some time and found a pattern I liked. Somebody import them please!

In my last full day in Tokyo — and in Japan for that matter — dcharlie from NeoGAF was nice enough to take me around to Akihabara for some video game browsing which lead to video game shopping. I didn’t go looking for anything in particular and didn’t even expect to pick anything up. I know, I must have been out of my mind to think that. It all started after spotting a copy of the not-so-great yet limited Club Nintendo copy of “Game & Watch Collection. That reminded me of the Bit Generations series for Game Boy Advance which Nintendo released in 2006. After about 5 stores, we found one that sold five of the seven games at the bargain price of ¥500. I had no luck finding dotstream or Orbital unfortuntely. I’ll have to find a way to complete that collection at some point. We noticed that it does seem like a lot of the stores are starting to pare down their GBA stock quite a bit.

The rest were fairly random purchases during the walking around (Raiden Fighters Aces, OneeChanbara VorteX and a cheap copy of Senko No Ronde Rev. X — which came to the US as WarTech). Sad thing is, I don’t have a Japanese Xbox 360, just figured I would get one eventually. I think…

Spotted this off of Joystiq today and knew it was worth the repost…

Flickr user Matthew Johnston has put together a pretty sharp photoset showing key Liberty City landmarks and their real-world versions around New York City. I still haven’t spent much time at all in Grand Theft Auto IV yet but this is great stuff!

Matthew Johnston’s “Sightseeing in Liberty City” photoset

I have to confess that last week I purchased Arcana Heart. I was completely in the dark that Atlus was releasing this game here in the United States. Not that it mattered, I never heard of it. Until XiaNaphryz posted his thread (with a somewhat sensationalist title) on NeoGAF, although the content was admittedly taken from a well-researched Penny Arcade thread, that sold me to the game with the in-depth information.

Although some of the design choices do have a dubious otaku quality, hence all the schoolgirl age anime characters, the game design (mix and match character and arcana) and the sheer insanity of the character design — girl with devil wings? witch with a demon staff? 10 year old scientist hell bent on taking over the world while riding in a giant anthropomorphic blog of water/jelly? — are well worth feeling a little dirty. I just haven’t gotten to the point of looking at the move list and doing something other than button mashing whilst playing it.