Sunday, August 31, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV
This is probably starting to get boring, but I’m sure I’ll mix it up with another game this week. You should be thankful I’m not solely intent on finishing some 100+ hour RPG. Although that is in my backlog…

Just more of the same this time. I’m already caught up and starting new missions that I haven’t done previously. A city this vast and all these cars make me wish there is a car collecting sidequest because that would be a lot of fun. Maybe there is one, I haven’t bothered to go looking anything up.

*****

Monday, September 1, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV
So I finally stand up for Cousin Roman and end up killing Vlad, disposing of the body just by dumping him in the river. I sure hope Niko watched Eastern Promises and learned a thing or two about disposing corpses in bodies of water without having to weigh it down–it’s all about the undercurrent.

Truth be told, I found Niko’s turn from apathetic to … still mostly apathetic loyal friend in this mission a little jarring. Although the last mission with Vlad ended in Niko giving Vlad a piece of his mind via some not-so-kind words and then Niko has an emotional argument with Roman before he runs to confront Vlad, Niko’s supposed act of loyal friendship felt cold and nearly meaningless. No unlike all his kills in previous missions. Even the execution tutorial, which turns the Niko into a more ruthless killer for taking down a defenseless foe, didn’t evoke an emotional response. I felt disconnected, not too different than when I would fool around and go on a random killing civilians spree just to see how high I could get my wanted stars level before biting the dust. I know this is just the beginning of the game, but it was clear that the game script and cutscenes were trying to create this tenuous indentured servitude between Niko and Vlad where Niko was taking on jobs to spare his cousin Vlad’s eventual wrath. To be fair Niko undertook those missions with some reluctance and a sense of acceptance that this is “what must be done.”

In this instance, Grand Theft Auto IV didn’t develop a close relationship between Niko and Roman enough for me to want to go kill Vlad–I was along for the ride. I wasn’t convinced that Niko wanted to be on that ride either. There was no immediate threat to the safety of Roman or himself which compels him to act so quickly, so decisively, to eliminate Vlad–there were only Roman’s drunken, bitter tears over an unrequited love with Mallorie. An emotion which he had kept hidden from Niko for the entire time we’ve witnessed their interactions–we just thought that Roman was just merely interested in her. Will the script engage me long enough to care about other deaths or killings in the future? I can only hope so.

*****

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Unidentified Secret Game C
If I keep this up I’ll get through the alphabet by the end of the year. Can’t say a peep about this one. Spent about an hour and a half on it though. I had…

[REDACTED]

So there you have my full set of impressions.

*****

Saturday, September 6, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV
After disposing of a dealer threatening Real Badman’s business, Little Jacob decided he wants to go to the strip club. And thus began another social sim thread in Grand Theft Auto IV–I’m only about 68% friends with Little Jacob so far, so there’s quite a ways to go. It’s been interesting to have to navigate these social tasks in order to open up certain perks in the game. It’s making me think a lot about Persona 3: FES, a game in which the social/dating sim side of things plays a key role for the RPG. I’m only about twenty minutes into Persona 3: FES, but I know I will return to that soon.

*****

Q.E.D.

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Castle Crashers
I’ve been waiting to play this since I put my hands on what amounts to be the first level way back at GDC 2007 when Castle Crashers was part of the Independent Games Festival (IGF). So far I only played through to the end of the first level again, but this was the first time doing it solo. What is it lately about my attraction to the retro 8-bit aesthetic? I even really, really like nu-retro like what Pac-Man: Championship Edition or Galaga Legions were designed to look like. So of course, that means I’m instantly in love with the retro name-selection screen used as the game credits sequence. That’s not to say I don’t like Dan Paladin’s art design in the game, because I do as well. God, I love Golden Axe so much and this is just like that so far, but better — upgradable items and a multi-path overworld map? Awesome. Although that means this game really won’t shine until you can play it co-op. The one game I was invited to disconnected–which seems to be a well-known issue–and I don’t have any local options right this minute to round out players 2 - 4. I stopped after beating the boss of the first level, which was an easier task than I imagined it would be. As I stopped for the night, I’m left with a nail-biting choice: the dock or the forest entrance…

Unidentified Secret Game A
This wasn’t a game from where I work, but I can’t talk about it. More fun than I expected however and I haven’t played this series of games before, much to the chagrin of some industry friends. I will revisit this one again, but it’s not a high priority at the moment.

Unidentified Secret Game B
Yup, can’t talk about this one either. I wanted to just “try it out for a minute.” Ha! Fate had more diabolical designs in mind and some unseen force compelled me to continue playing until i was a third of the way through.

I have but two words, my friends: frothing demand.

Grand Theft Auto IV

Today begins my restart of Grand Theft Auto IV. I got motivated again because I’ve been thinking a lot about movie trailers, game trailers and the similarity between GTA IV’s debut trailer and Koyaanisqatsi–read the comment responses in this post by Jenn Frank for some insightful discussion.

The first time through I couldn’t get Michelle to go on a date with me again for any reason. I found out that this was weird when talking to some friends, because they had no problems having her like pretty much anything you did with her on a date. I wasn’t happy I struck out, not to mention I think I missed a mission when I accidentally jumped out of a moving car on the phone. So now I’m right back at the very beginning, listening to Roman talk about American titties over and over again. At least I hadn’t made it very far that pretty soon I’ll be back to parts of the story I haven’t encountered yet.

*****

Thursday, August 28, 2008

[Struggled with some massive self-inflicted PC issues tonight, which cut into my gaming time.]

Grand Theft Auto IV
Banged out a few missions today but still not back to where I was before I restarted. I’m back to where I can take my first mission from Vlad, but I haven’t done that yet. I realized I need to relearn which cars are the “good” cars to jack since it’s been so long since I last played it. Turned off the radio in all the cars tonight, for some reason I’m not longer thrilled with that and just want to hear the sounds of the city. I’m starting to get impatient to start making new progress.

*****

Friday, August 29, 2008

Grand Theft Auto IV
Took time to make some more progress. Got my second date with Michelle and she liked it and me afterwards. Progress! How much are lapdances at the strip bar anyway? I walked in with $230 and I still had the bouncers come after me after I accepted all the offers to continue. This time I beat up the two bouncers and made a run for it, somehow retaining all of my money. Score +1 for having no morals whatsoever. I’m still about two missions behind from where I used to be, but I’m almost there. Then the fun starts again.

*****

Q.E.D.

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.

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.

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.

Last night IGN put up a story about how Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune would get a patch to add Trophy support “very, very soon.” Which it is. In the piece there is a short video that shows Trophies in action in Uncharted (below). Along with that there’s a brief interview with a Naughty Dog rep, Arne Meyer, about the Trophy paaa…

Oh wait. Yeah, that’s me.

Guess now it’s “official.” Even though it’s just words on a screen, this feels as awkward as watching yourself on video or listening to a recording of yourself — I still have nightmares about my totally stellar (not) podcast spot with the G-Pinions guys. Thankfully I manage not to sound like a fool, so there might be more where these come from. Now, time to cease the auto-critique…

I’ve been very keen lately on exploring games that subvert established genres or standard gameplay elements and just plain do something new and different. I’ve been snapping a bunch at a time lately, definitely at a far faster rate than I can play them. There is, without a doubt, a lot that can be taken away from these days as a game player, as someone involved in game development and just as a all around critical thinker. It isn’t just me as there has been increased focus on independent games and larger publishers are taking (relatively minor) chances in picking these games up. Games like PixelJunk Eden, Everyday Shooter and Braid are just a few examples that have embodied this new attention to innovative games.

This quest to learn more and expand my own gaming boundaries–there are more than enough games in my library that are pretty standard, yet successful, fare–has led to purchases of games like God Hand, Persona 3, The Red Star and Killer 7–the latter part of my larger Suda51 exploration. Shamefully I can’t say I’ve gotten anywhere significant yet to talk about what I think about them or what I’ve gained from playing through them, but it will happen. Oh yes, it will happen. Soon.

Somehow in all my poking around for strange games I passed over the occasional mention of Segagaga. It wasn’t until a link to the Hardcore Gaming 101 page for this game that I paid rapt attention. Regardless of whether this might have been Sega’s slightly insane swansong or just a totally bonkers idea that got greenlighted into production, there are some really interesting ideas here. It definitely takes the ideas of meta-game to a level beyond what I would have imagined in a game from a major publisher–and, at the time, console maker. The level of references back to Sega itself, it’s characters and even it’s own hardware I think is entirely unmatched in video games. It’s interesting too because much of the current film lexicon that lives deep within our collective consciousness is built upon referencing bits and pieces of prior films, literature or other visual arts–so much so that in some cases the film transcends into post-moderism.

Anyhow, I digress. What’s happened is now I’m interested in picking up this game somehow, given that it doesn’t seem super easy since eBay sales are fairly sparse or potentially shady what with the easily cracked GD-ROM technology. Nevermind I still have to get my hands on a working Japanese Dreamcast console to play it without again resorting to hacking and other trickery. I wonder what the chances that some used shop in Akihabara would happen to have it…

Segagaga cover art and screenshot courtesy of Hardcore Gaming 101

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!

There’s plenty of stylized games out there, but I find something more organic and attractive in the flowing hand-drawn lines in the pieces of concept art I’ve seen over my life. Not only that but it seems, at least in the eyes of publishers, that there is plenty of space for games whose art styles are far more diverse than realistic or cartoon-y. I guess you could say that Another World (or Out of this World here in the US) was approximating this type of aesthetic in its game art.

Without a doubt, upcoming Xbox LIVE Arcade title Braid most closely captures the answer to my own question. It is one of the more beautiful games I’ve played in a while, so I can’t wait to play the final version.

Image of Uncharted concept art courtesy of Gamersyde. Image of Braid from the Braid blog.