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.

First I need to get my frid… I mean Wii back from an old coworker who borrowed it. Then I have to free up some space in internal memory, which is full of Virtual Console games and one WiiWare game–Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King, which I haven’t even played yet. I think there will be plenty of easy targets for moving them off to the SD card for storage. For example, after playing it again, I can’t for the life of me remember why I was so fond of the Splatterhouse franchise. Apparently I wasn’t the only one since there is a next-gen (can we kill this term now?) remake in the works.

Anyhow, I now so greatly desire my Wii back (snicker) because Mega Man was released on Virtual Console this week. I actually had to make a quick scan of my NES games to make sure I didn’t already own this, as I do remember playing it many times. But I don’t. I already wanted to revisit it seeing as the super retro Mega Man 9 is on the way and the Virtual Console release just sealed the deal.

I want my… I want my NintyWii. plzkthx.

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…

We launched a new online ad campaign today and, let me tell you, it was cooked up by some extremely creative, enterprising people. Or maybe they just read NeoGAF far too much. We’ll never know. We do know that NeoGAF (kinda, sorta) still loves the cats. Several other sites, like Wii Fanboy and Go Nintendo like them too. Good show!

Grab your own Geometry Wars: Galaxies lolcats code at the GWG Cats site.

Image courtesy of John Harker (NeoGAF).

It’s like Super Paper Mario knows exactly WHO YOU ARE or something. Definitely funny and it’s great to see the fan-service in some of the games these days. It made me laugh. There’s a whole thread — complete with over 100 posts — on NeoGAF about it.

Click the image for a larger view if you desire one.

Chick Chick Boom is a pretty cool little Flash game, quite obviously made for Europe. It’s “powered by Nintendo” and it uses a DS-like gameplay mechanic and by that I mean drawing like if you had been using the stylus.

Basically you are in control of the yellow chicks — which look almost like Loco Roco characters — and the bunny controls the dark chicks. You have to select and then use your mouse to trace the outline of shapes to do different things in the game. They range from dropping a heavy object or sending a bomb to the dark chicks. On the flip side, when the bunny sends a bomb to your side, you can use either of the directional arrows to move all your chicks away from it. How accurate you are corresponds to how accurate your weapon or control is. It’s a pretty fun game and totally addictive to keep playing through it. I don’t think you even really need the Nintendo virtual-swag — I’ve gotten Mario Slam Basketball and Kororinpa wallpapers so far — to keep you going, in my opinion.

Anybody with a drawing tablet will have just a teeny bit of an advantage I think…

A weekly summary of what is being talked about quite a bit in the gaming community.

• Gears of War commercial with Mad World soundtrack
• David Jaffe speaks to Newsweek about EDI and XBLA
• Electronic Arts worries gamers with The Godfather downloadable content

Gears of War commercial with Mad World soundtrack released
Since I saw this Gears of War video a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been silently waiting for it to be released publicly. It was torture. Sitting in a darkened office at Microsoft, the first two viewings of this video gave me the chills. And it still does every time I watch it from the Xbox Live Marketplace download — and it’s been multiple times already. While I was already looking forward to Epic and CliffyB’s opus this holiday, the video officially got me to the point where I couldn’t wait for the game to be released — a sentiment that Brian at Kotaku echoes as well. That’s a hard thing to do since the last time I saw and touched Gears of War was back at E³.

ArsTechnica’s Opposable Thumbs blog opines why the trailer might be so moving, noting that it’s “good to see people who are actually excited about their game try a different feel for their ads and put more thought into sharing that enthusiasm.” The same sentiment which crossed my mind during my first viewing, and I was glad to see such a different and evocative approach taken instead of the usual “lots of guns and explosions” hard sell.

Always a good source of different viewpoints on the same thing (and often beaten to death), NeoGAF’s thread dedicated to the Gears of War commerical is quite the read with a not-insubstantial 35,000+ views. The posters in the thread discussed the merits of everything from the soundtrack choice, the rain, the glass refraction effects, to the in-engine graphical details (nevermind all the Halo talk… for now). If you’re one of the unfortunate few who have been living under a rock in the past week, you can watch the standard or high-definition versions at the links below. Do it. Now.

• Gears of War commercial - standard resolution version
• Gears of War commercial - high-definition version

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David Jaffe speaks to Newsweek about EDI and XBLA
Earlier this week, N’Gai Croal of Newsweek posted an interview with David Jaffe, designer of the Twisted Metal series, God of War and Criminal Crackdown as an upcoming PS3 downloadable title. While I’ve known of David, I’ve never seen him or met him until he appeared as one of the more outspoken of the four heralded game designers on MTV’s “Gods of Gaming” segment. It should come as no surprise then that his interview style is a big more free-wheeling than others and that was definitely present in N’Gai Croal’s piece. In it, Jaffe took a few jabs at the current game offering on Xbox Live Arcade service by calling it more of an oldies radio station based on all the classic game available. I can see how this quote can be taken incorrectly in a written article since there is not much information to contextualize it and provide the tone Jaffe had.

No doubt that is what happened to Joystiq when they summarized the interview with David Jaffe. Chris Kohler at Game|Life somewhat concurs with Joystiq’s analysis while mentioning Jaffe’s move away from epic games to the shorter, quicker release downloadable market. Brian Crecente over at Kotaku took a more rigorous approach to analyzing down the interview, mentioning that while he didn’t agree with Jaffe’s take on Xbox Live Arcade, he welcomes the competition from Sony so both platforms push each other to excel. Even industry business site Next Generation picked up on Jaffe’s comparison between the PS3 and Xbox 360’s downloadable offerings through a music analogy.

A user on NeoGAF posted the Joystiq story and the board heavily debated the merits of the quote and Jaffe’s intent. After some time, David himself popped into NeoGAF and both explained what he meant in the interview and posted a link to his blog, where he responds to the Joystiq post and again explains that he was only being lighthearted by reiterating that he was only “cracking a joke and not realizing how shitty and petty it sounded until I saw it in print.” It just shows how rather difficult it is to not be wholly serious in a print interview, because things can easily be taken in either direction. Something which interviews such as the MTV segment, showing both video and audio, help avoid.

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Electronic Arts worries gamers with The Godfather downloadable content
Following up on Tiger Woods 07 downloadable content, which included things you could unlock while playing the game through, a sizable amount of in-game content for The Godfather was released this week on Xbox Live Marketplace. The downloadable content included several new missions, in-game items such as weapons and in-game currency. It is the latter which made gamers take notice at the downloadable content, even if many did not own the title itself. These are precisely the type of downloadable content that the gaming community feared — ones that could possibly give some sort of advantage of those less fortunate than others. In this case, it only affects a single player title. Gamers hope that this release doesn’t indicate that this type content will accelerate and turn into content which could imbalance multi-player games, similar to how MMOs have been affected.

A slew of bloggers reported on this latest series of downloadable content with the same concerns. Joystiq points out how the downloadable content “charges” a gamer twice “when you realize you don’t have enough virtual money, you turn around and use more real money to buy more virtual money, so you can re-buy the gun you already bought with real money.” On Game|Life, Chris Kohler points out how he feels that gamers are being charged by content which was not created after the game was released, but rather that the game content was already included and gamers were only paying to unlock it. On ArsTechnica’s Opposable Thumbs blog, Ben Kuchera echos the worry of the gaming community by warning that “EA tends to take these kinds of ideas way too far, so let’s see how they’ll make this a bad idea in the next year or so.”

Several message boards voiced their displeasure with this type of paid downloadable content, nearly all referenced these as a continuation of the Tiger Woods 07 downloadables. Over at Quarter to Three the original poster summed up the sentiment by stating “I don’t know which is worse… selling money, or selling this: [The Level 4 Weapon Bundle].” NeoGAF was likely among the most outspoken of message boards getting over 200 replies and 7,000 views in a mere 16 hours — the posters were visably not thrilled about this downloadable content.
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