The gamer who once was

31 October 08 | 22:13 | Posted by: eirikr

As gamers, we know we can get a little too obsessed sometimes. But have you ever considered that, perhaps, our obsession is really a possession? When we play for hours on end with no want of the outside world, it seems that games are the true masters of our behavior.

Such is the tale of Howie, a once amiable young man who had his life turned upside-down by such an unfortunate obsession. His spooky tale is recounted below by a former friend who wishes to remain anonymous, who has also provided video evidence of the critical moment that changed Howie's life…forever. After reading it, maybe you will be more mindful of those recommended hourly breaks...

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category: games | forums | four comments | §

A thousand-word triptych; or, shoot the (hard)core

31 October 08 | 18:32 | Posted by:

As usual, Penny Arcade manages to distill many of the thoughts behind my rambling word slop into three concise panels.

I won't deny that the futility of trying to keep abreast of major releases is a huge factor in my deciding to sit this fall out. (A decision to which I'm not quite as dedicated as I might seem; I'm having a tough time forcing myself not to restore my preorder for Valkyria Chronicles, for example.) I think I've been suffering long-term residual shell-shock from 1UP's first real fall season, when a paltry five of us were writing all the reviews, previews, news, features and guides for one of gaming's biggest years ever. The realization that the site can get along just fine without me hovering over the new release section like an anxious den mother has taken a while to sink in, but it's really quite a relief. It's freed me to look forward to the launch of the expanded content section and the opportunity to write about things that aren't games, because there's so much more to life than this silly little medium.



Another factor, though, has been my increasing revulsion at the prospect of association with self-proclaimed hardcore gamers. Just look at how various forums responded today to Jennifer Tsao's departure from 1UP for a depressing example. Jen wasn't just a great managing editor (a thankless, behind-the-scenes job that keeps a site's visible content moving at an even clip), but she brought a welcome and necessary perspective to our publications. Buuut: since her mature, reasoned point of view threatened the entrenched patriarchal hegemony of the hardcore gamer, her move to Sega has been met with more "good riddance" than "good luck," and that's pathetic given all that's she's brought to the gaming press. But such tends to be the case with people who think of themselves as hardcore: that is, they tend to be pretty pathetic. (Not all of them, of course.)

Of course, despite my flagging interest in the very narrow stream of content presented as Must-Play Experiences by the industry's finely-tuned engine of promotion and advertising, I'm still perfectly fine writing about the medium that has treated me so well these past years. There's more to gaming than the latest grisly exercise in shooting a bald musclebound spaceman in the face, and there are enough intelligent fans of the form to interact with whose shoulders are mercifully free of chips.

So keep it lively, guys. You're the object that blunts my innate pessimism to mere cynicism.

category: games | forums | 22 comments | §

Hallow and welcome

31 October 08 | 13:51 | Posted by: Nicola Nomali

Today is Halloween, and many of you will be making the most of the all-hallowed evening at costumed social gatherings. Others, adult life being what it is, have to work tonight. And the rest of you might be planning to spend the night in like any other, keeping to yourself as you please. You might even be thinking of turning out the front lights, thinking, "Man, eff trick-or-treaters" -- that you just can't be bothered distributing candy to children (our future).

That being the case, I would advise you to quickly download this old episode of the dearly departed GFW Radio, skip to 5:23, and listen to what Jeff Green has to say to you.

Jeff and I trust you'll do the right thing.

category: blog | forums | three comments | §

Play create share

31 October 08 | 10:40 | Posted by: Levi

With the launch of LittleBigPlanet, I'd like to offer a suggestion to all the budding creators out there who are now or will soon be using the game's easy-to-use tools to create their own levels and publishing them for the community to play: please consider turning off the copy protection. When you publish a level in this game, one of the settings you can tweak is whether or not you'll let people copy your level onto their game. I am afraid a lot of people won't do this, because popular levels from the beta have already been copied and republished exactly under a different name with no attribution to the original creator. That sucks, and the people trying to bask in the reflected glory of the hard work done by someone else should be tarred and feathered. But the nascent LBP community has already identified the offenders, and one only has to peruse the various forum threads devoted to the game to see who the plagiarists are.

Turning off the copy protection might result in your level being bootlegged, which would be a shame. On the other hand, letting the community at large take a close look at how you put your level together is the best way to share your good ideas. In the beta, nothing could be copy-prohibited, and I learned a lot by copying levels into my game and checking out exactly what they did to achieve the different cool gameplay mechanics or special effects in their levels. When I make my next level, I will be doing it with that knowledge, building on what has come before. My hope is that someone else will copy my level, see what I've done, and further build on that. I might someday play a level ten or fifteen times removed from what I've done, and see in there the evolution of an idea I had. That's cool.

My dream for LBP is for it to be collaborative beyond just multiplayer level-editing. To have hundreds of gamers building on each other's work can only make the community levels more fun for everyone. The first step in getting there is for everyone to share their work. I hope you'll consider doing just that.

category: games | forums | six comments | §

I didn't feel myself evaporate

30 October 08 | 21:52 | Posted by:

Please allow me to take Mr. Nicolai's post below a step beyond: I have given up on gaming.

Well, in a certain sense. What I mean to say is that I've given up on keeping up with gaming -- that is to say, I'm not buying any new releases this fall. Except a couple of Atlus games, of course, because if I skip Persona 4 and Poison Pink now I'll have to pay twice their actual value in a year. Besides those two exceptions, though -- nothing! I picked up Order of Ecclesia last week and played about 10 minutes of it before shrugging and going to back to tending shop with Torneko. I've made a few forays into the world of Mana, too. (Via a 14-year-old Mana adventure.) But for some reason, everything else leaves me cold -- and the games that actually do interest me aren't so compelling I feel like paying money for them right now.

I suspect that all of this can be traced back to my random encounter with poverty a little while ago. Scrambling desperately to pay for rent and food for half a year forced me to stop and say, "Is it really necessary to keep up with every single release that comes down the pipeline?" Sure, I work in the gaming press, but it's not like we have a shortage of people happy to write about Dead Space and Resistance 2 on our staff. Why should I feel obligated to keep up simply for appearances' sake? This revelation resulted in a round of serious preorder culling; and after further thought, I looked at interesting titles like Fallout 3 and Valkyria Chronicle and realized that I don't really need them, either...at least not until next year, when they've had a price cut. Mind you, I've taken great pleasure in dredging up stuff to use on my new Twin Famicom; it's just the shiny new things that I have little interest in, probably because they all demand a lot more time to complete than something like Kabuki Quantum Fighter.

Not coincidentally, I've also quietly bowed out of reviews duty as well, because I can't seem to drum up enough give-a-crap to bother completing anything these days, and finishing stuff for review got to be painful. Besides, my main interest in game writing has always been researching and writing about the medium's history, and I enjoy that part of it more than ever. Sooner or later, Fable II will enter the purview of Retronauts. I'll probably get around to playing it then. (Assuming there are any working Xbox 360s left in the world in ten years.)

That's not to say I'm completely apathetic about upcoming releases -- and at the moment, nothing interests me quite so much as this little gem:

I saw some new screens for Dragon Quest IX over on that one corrupt and evil forum this morning, and it filled my shriveled little heart with happiness. Just look at it! Level-5 always manages to squeeze much more out of the systems it works on than should really be possible, and that seems to go double for the DS. DQIX looks like it's going to make Matrix's Final Fantasy remakes feel like amateur hour.

But what interests me most about this Dragon Quest is its multiplayer dynamic. I'm not normally one for gaming with others, but the concept of a traditional turn-based RPG with multiple players taking turns making input and working together to take down foes seems really intriguing and could make the toughest battles even more exciting than usual. Plus, DQ's tradition of no battle truly lost means you're less likely to genuinely hate a fellow party member for screwing up; you'll lose some cash if you team up with some weaksauce mage who wants to attack feebly rather than cast spells, but you won't lose the game.

The lower image shows the battle system playing out exactly as I imagined, and exactly as it should: each player chooses which foe to attack, moving down the player list in sequence with all commands and targets clearly marked. Player one is attacking; the second player, is casting "Mera" (which I think is "Sizzle"); and player three is trying to decide whether to go after a Slime or a Bodkin Archer. Meanwhile, player four is wishing the others would hurry the heck up.

I was disappointed when the action RPG system Square Enix initially showed off for the system disappeared, but in retrospect it was probably smart move. The Japanese portable market is more or less clogged with Monster Hunter play-alikes at this point, and had DQIX stayed on its original course it would have simply been another in a long line of me-too trend-jumpers. Hardly a description befitting its legacy. Besides, this turn-based approach seems more in keeping with the spirit of the series, not just the mechanics; DQ is about accessibility and playability, and a system that plays out at the party's speed should be a lot friendlier to the wide demographic spread that comprises the Dragon Quest userbase.

After all, as Nicolai astutely pointed out, "hardcore" and "casual" are just descriptions of gamers, not games. And Dragon Quest is a series for everyone -- even curmudgeons like me, it seems.

category: games | forums | 27 comments | §

Frog blast the hardcore

30 October 08 | 17:29 | Posted by:

I've become decreasingly interested in what gaming's blockbuster releases have to offer with each passing year. You can't play everything and when the aggregate of major titles amount to a homogeneous swath of brown space marine gladiator zombie hunts it's hard to care. My friend gave me a brief tour of Dead Space this evening. It's very scary! He was stuck behind an impenetrable window incapable of helping as a crewman screamed for help behind as he was methodically killed, his head exploded like a Jackson Pollack against the glass. The attention to detail extends to the menus, a holographic representation that your avatar reacts to. Without this type of direct exposure I may have never looked twice at this game. Even the local word-of-mouth hadn't swayed me. So please indulge me in my Scott McCloud fantasies as I wonder aloud about the language used to describe video games.

When the paleolithic gaming press (journalisticas vidyagame) first roamed the Earth, they fashioned their wares from the only tools available to them, the language that the console manufacturers were using to distinguish themselves. In the 1970's a tasteful wood grain deco may have been all they needed, but as the cold war between Nintendo and... everyone that was not Nintendo got more competitive, the advertising became more hyperbolic, the capabilities of the various systems took center stage and game reviews became framed in those same terms, broken down into rigid categories. Graphics, sound, gameplay, "fun". It's a little better today, at least in some corners of the internet, but the metric of how people judge games continues to be narrowly defined. It's just that the terms have changed.

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category: games | forums | eight comments | §

Gateway to a second dimension

30 October 08 | 13:41 | Posted by:

My last post got me thinking: this has been a pretty excellent year for fans of the Second Dimension. In addition to finally getting our hands on a comprehensible version of the aforementioned Mother 3, we've had a surprisingly decent amount of 2D (and semi-2D) releases for a time when even our handhelds are doing 3D.

First up is the "Good lord, that's beautiful!" category, lead by Wario Land: Shake It! Have you seen that thing? Regardless of whether or not it's worth more than a rental, it is certainly gorgeous to look at (but I guess hiring an animation studio to work with you will do that). In the same vein, we finally got a glimpse at Muramasa: The Demon Blade, another piece of 2D eye candy from the folks that brought us the stunning Odin Sphere. If your jaw isn't on the floor, you're probably at the wrong website, pal.

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category: games | forums | six comments | §

Server issues

30 October 08 | 08:23 | Posted by: Levi

It seems like more and more games are being released and then collapsing under the weight of the people trying to play them. I think the worst experience I've ever had in that vein was trying to register to play Metal Gear Online. It took hours and hours and constant refreshes on web-based infrastructure apparently built with the belief that no one would actually try to play the game. Server issues seem at their worst in games where the multiplayer aspect is more important; online-only games likeSOCOM: Confrontation and Metal Gear Online are unplayable immediately after their release, and online-focused games like LittleBigPlanet have trouble accommodating the influx of players when the game finally hits store shelves.

It's incredibly frustrating, and since all of these games had public, online betas before their release, it's also quite inexplicable. I know that betas these days are just glorified demos, but the server issues that crippled all of these aforementioned games post-launch were all present in the beta phase. What is the cause? I don't know much about the tech behind online gaming, but as a layman, it seems to me that these companies are underestimating the demand for their game. With a release like LittleBigPlanet, which seems to be a cornerstone of Sony's PlayStation 3 marketing strategy, how is that possible? Especially since the recall limited the amount of copies that actually made it into consumers' hands.

I wrote earlier about how game publishers are experimenting with ways to reward early adopters, some of which rely on Xbox Live or the PlayStation Network. One of the games that is doing that is LittleBigPlanet, which has free, limited edition DLC for week one purchasers. It seems to me that all the progress they make in trying to get consumers to jump on their products as soon as they hit shelves is undermined if the day one experience is going to be a laggy, frustrating disaster.

category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

Please please me

29 October 08 | 23:33 | Posted by:

The title of this post has nothing to do with the title of the post below. It's one of those weird coincidences where I formulated my own post in my head on the way home only to log in and find someone else had written something with an eerily similar title -- though not at all about the same topic.

Nah, this is about the mysterious Beatles/MTV announcement due in the morning. The one that all gaming publications are somehow on the hook for. Hmm, what could it possibly be? Obviously, it means we can expect to find Beatles tunes in some form of MTV music game Rock Band soon.

This neatly answers a question that bugged me when I played the new Guitar Hero last week -- one that I was planning to blog about soon, in fact. (I guess this saves the me trouble.) I was happy to see "Band on the Run" included in Guitar Hero, because who doesn't love Wings? And I couldn't complain about "Beat It," because Michael Jackson's Thriller was unspeakably huge when I was in elementary school. I mean, seriously, it's hard to explain just how pervasive and awe-inspiring it seemed back then unless you happen to also have been an impressionably youngster, in which case you already know. "But hey, don't Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson collectively hold the rights to the entire Beatles catalog?" I asked myself. "So why do they have songs in Guitar Hero, but there are no Beatles tunes? They're great songs, but hardly sacred."

I guess the answer is pretty obvious now: there are no Beatles songs in Guitar Hero because they're all exclusive to Rock Band. And I've gotta say, if MTV decided to put out a version of Rock Band that was nothing but Beatles, I would buy that so fast it would...it would be, uh, very fast. Yes.

I can't wait to activate my Star Power for "Her Majesty." Wait, wrong game.



Also, I took reader advice on the cover of the bonus magazine. I wasn't happy with the art, of course, but I liked the alternate suggestions you guys came up with. Why not use sprites? Why not take a photo? So I combined the two and took a photo of sprites, and tossed the original artwork in there for the heck of it. Hopefully it will photograph well! I'm quite happy with the pic, I must say. So thanks, random commenters!

Edit: It sounds like the new Beatles thing won't be Rock Band-related at all, but rather a Beatles-branded version of Peter Gabriel's XPLORA-1. Say it ain't so, Paul, lest I weep right alongside my guitar.

category: games, gamespite | forums | nine comments | §

Please believe me

29 October 08 | 21:30 | Posted by: Nicola Nomali

If you're an intelligent patron of the arts (which you must be if you're reading GameSpite, baby), you honestly don't have much practical use for professional criticism. Whether it's games or films, your senses are well-honed enough to accurately predict a product's worth to you at a glance -- nine times out of ten, at least. It's in that rare one-out-of-ten case that a savvy individual stumbles upon something that by all appearances should be irredeemable dreck but is actually delightful, whereupon he makes it his burden to preach to his skeptical peers the correction of an undeserved appraisal.

Prepare your disbelief, then, as I present you with a big one: Sex Drive is actually a really good movie.

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category: film | forums | ten comments | §

Your Mother's biggest secret

29 October 08 | 15:28 | Posted by:

Having finished the first chapter, I can safely say the biggest secret about Mother 3 is that the sprite work and animation is actually the most impressive thing about it. Don't get me wrong; I've found the battle system to be fun (rare for an RPG these days) and the story both emotional and hilarious, so consider just how good this game has to look to trump both of those things. Somehow, Brownie Brown managed to make the game simultaneously look like its predecessor and completely surpass just about every other 2D game ever. (Considering EarthBound was originally panned for looking too simplistic, this is quite a feat.)

I remember when Final Fantasy X and Metal Gear Solid 2 came out the same holiday season that it really highlighted how important animation, rather than raw graphics, were to making something look good. The idea is apt here, too. Mother 3 is a GBA game, meaning it's SNES-quality graphics at best. That's fine; I'm inclined to like those anyway. The reason it's such a treat to look at, even in a modern world of HD remakes, is the same (and apparently only) reason Wario Land: Shake It! was so exciting: the gorgeous animation.

Each character, whether they're an NPC or a member of your party, animate in a way that makes each one a unique entity. It’s almost as if, somehow, against all odds, the designers noticed that you don't need dialogue to give something personality. Sometimes the littlest visual "tells" -- Flint's tendency to tip his hat, for example -- immediately communicate the same depth of character, with no readin' necessary. This, more than anything else, indicates it's a Nintendo game, since Nintendo has always understood how the tiniest of details can produce an immeasurable amount of personality.

So yes, it's a shame this never officially came here, but miraculously, it's the graphics in this two-and-a-half-year-old GBA game that I most regret more people can’t see. Static images don't do it justice; it really, truly must be played. Unfortunately, I'm roughly in the same boat as Parish when it comes to emulation, so I can't force myself to play any more Mother 3 until my flash cart arrives; with any luck, I'll get it this week, but until then, I hope I can find something to play. It's been kind of a slow month for games, so we'll see.

category: games | forums | ten comments | §

The mysterious kitty-bunny

29 October 08 | 09:36 | Posted by: Levi

The other morning, as I was traversing my backyard in order to put out some grub for the gaggle of demanding stray cats that have made it their home, I heard a strange noise. I looked around for a bit, and decided it must have been the rabbits and one of their strange rabbit rituals. Their ways are mysterious to me. I spent a bit of time visiting with my wild-cat friends, whose friendship was bought with daily feedings and kind words. (Of course, it's not all roses and rainbows for them; all of these cats have been trapped and had their reproductive organs removed! That's a lot more than I would pay for a cozy yard to sleep in and meal service!)

I went back in just as my wife was getting up. She peeked out the back window to check on the resident menagerie, and I heard an exclamation. "There's a kitty in the trap!"

"Oh, I guess that's what I heard. I thought it was the bunnies."

"Bunnies don't mewl!" she told me. At the time, she didn't know how wrong she was.

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category: blog | forums | 21 comments | §

Inertia

28 October 08 | 23:18 | Posted by:

The first bonus mailouts for GameSpite supporters were supposed to have gone in the mail a month ago. They haven't, yet, and I feel lousy about that pretty much every single day. Truth is, the bonus magnets were ready a month ago; the mini-magazine was written and laid out a month ago. The problem, though, is that it needs a bit of art, and I swore off drawing a while back -- for good reason, since my artwork was never great to begin with and has degraded horribly over the years. But it needs a cover, and it would feel false to have someone else draw it, so I've been stalled out at the point actually committing pen to paper.

The good news, I guess, is that I finally choked back my bile long enough to hack something out tonight. While it's not particularly good, at least it's done and I can get this issue out of the way soon. (And put the second one on its proper schedule. And give it a cover made entirely with text.) Anyway, my apologies in advance to any children or pets who are left emotionally scarred by the sight of the results.

category: blog | forums | seven comments | §

New Games Plus: week of 10/28/08

28 October 08 | 22:47 | Posted by: reibeatall

This week, the real heavy hitters are coming out, just in time for Christmas. These games will sell out across the country, as grubby hands reach for them. Parents will buy them in droves.

And nobody here cares about any of them. There's something I noticed during the three years I spent working at a GameStop that happens way more than most people care to talk about, and that's the fact that budget games sell well and children's licensed games sell even better. Sure, your Halos and your Grand Theft Autos sell millions and millions of copies, but I'm sure that the other games cost a helluva lot less to make.

These games are wildly successful for two main reasons; one, the names carry a lot of weight. When a kid wants the Ben 10 movie and the Ben 10 action figures and he was Ben 10 for Halloween, it's not a hard leap to add in the Ben 10 video game as well. When a parent's shopping for their child and they see a video game with a character they recognize, there's a greater chance that this parent is going to purchase said item from recognizable franchise.

And then you have the bargain shoppers. The people who buy games based on price. In a landscape where the average game comes out at a whopping sixty dollars (and then collector's and limited editions running upwards of a hundred and thirty dollars), a game that's priced at thirty or forty looks way more attractive, or hell, even fifteen in the case of Playstation 2 games. In these trying economic times, a penny saved is a penny not lost to the stock market. People are freaking the hell out about this economy thing (and with good reason), but they'll still make sure little Billy has his bull riding video game.

So what does this mean to you, the hardcore gamer? Not a damn thing. Maybe you'll see TV Show King Party at Best Buy while you're heading to grab LittleBigPlanet, or you'll laugh at the bull rider on the cover of Out Of The Chute, but that's the extent of these games imposing on your hardcore game time. Besides, I seriously doubt that any retailer outside of Wal-Mart is going to purchase more copies of the latest Dora the Explorer game than Fallout 3.

Without further ado, I present to you the video game releases for the week of October 28th, 2008, judged entirely on their covers.

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category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

New Game Plus: designated downloads for 10/28/08

28 October 08 | 17:08 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

Aside from the usual slate of new stuff, you (that is, we) PlayStation 3 owners can now play catch-up with Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slice Precipice of Darkness Episode 1 as well as Prince of Persia Classic, both of which were released last week on PSN.

Of course, everyone else you know has played them already! Maybe. In the case of POPC, most likely not.

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category: games | forums | four comments | §

Just like rock and roll

28 October 08 | 13:53 | Posted by: christopher

Yesterday, I finished Urasawa Naoki's 20th Century Boys. In related news, I have a new favorite manga series.

20th Century Boys is a near-future science fiction mystery, and the solutions to its puzzles lie in the gaps between the idealism of childhood and the disappointment of growing up. Without giving too much away, the story's main characters are literally assaulted by the ghosts of their imagination for reasons that slowly unravel as the plot progresses. Structurally, the story spans multiple generations, spiralling between eras; from the very first volume until the very end, 20th Century Boys jumps back and forth between children imagining epic battles with giant robots and adults facing the dangerous consequences of their own childhood fantasies come to life. As the main characters struggle to understand and confront this bizarre situation, fragmentary and intentionally distorted memories are gradually retold and revised from multiple perspectives as the truth gradually comes to light.

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category: manga | forums | five comments | §

The happiest junkie in the universe

28 October 08 | 07:31 | Posted by: Kat

I'm starting to think that it was a bad idea to get Gundam Battle Universe. It's like handing a junkie a pound of China White and saying, "Enjoy!" Only, instead of China White, it's Gundam. And it's me who's strung-out on the couch at 4:30 in the morning, eyes glued to my PSP as I try to take down Amuro in a Zaku. (Protip: Don't get anywhere near him. Seriously.)

Ahead of me stretches a game that spans both sides of three full television series, two OVA series, and a theatrical movie. The only equivalent I can think of is LucasArts losing their heads and making a starfighter combat game that encompasses not just the original trilogy, but pretty much everything up to the Yuuzhong Vong invasion. Oh, and every single character and fighter that has ever had so much as a cameo in anything would be unlockable. That's Gundam Battle Universe, and it does almost everything right. They even thought to make the mission titles like episode title cards -- complete with the music chime that came from the original Mobile Suit Gundam. Never underestimate the importance of tiny details like these for a nutcase such as myself. They're important, damnit.

Of course, Gundam Battle Unvierse also happens to embody a Namco Bandai trait that's both admirable and infuriating. It's infuriating because they're perfectly content to throw shit at the wall and hope something sticks. When it does stick, as it occasionally does when you make five Gundam games a year, sequels are guaranteed. Lots of them. But while they mostly only make iterative changes to their sequels, they do often manage to avoid making the same mistake twice, which is actually more than can be said for quite a few instances of Resident Evil. The net result is Gundam Battle Universe, which is so superior to the first iteration of the series that they're barely the same game. That, in case you were wondering, is the admirable part.

On the other hand, what this basically means is that if you want value for your money when buying from Namco Bandai, you just have to be patient enough to wait for the inevitable "universe" edition. Unless, of course, you're a Tales fans, in which case, good luck to you. As for me, I'll call the wait I didn't even know I had a fair trade-off, because right now I feel like the luckiest junkie in the universe. Star Wars fans wish they had it this good.

category: games | forums | five comments | §

Add to Queue #62: The "drop shadow" edition

27 October 08 | 16:08 | Posted by: Levi

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #62 | October 27, 2008: Welcome to Add to Queue, Levi's round-up of this week's US home video release highlights. Sorry, rest of the world. Region locks are the industry's way of saying they still don't understand the Internet. But on the flip side, I'm sure watching our horribly broken election process is way more entertaining than any of this week's movies.

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category: film | forums | fifteen comments | §

The secret of keeping it real

26 October 08 | 20:17 | Posted by:

The issue of real vs. fake appears to be more contentious than I expected, given that I didn't bother to dredge up anything about the morality of emulation and ROM-gathering. I wish I could sit down and do a demographic study on everyone who responded to see how if age, upbringing or personal history have any bearing on people's outlook, or it's just one of those random things.

Of course, after posting that bit of musing on how I'd rather play games in their original formats than emulated, what did I do? I downloaded Secret of Mana and started playing it on Virtual Console. Playing it with gusto, even.



This is admittedly an odd comparison to make, but I realized today that Mana is the inverse of Half-Life 2 for me. No, wait, it makes sense. See, when I play Half-Life 2, I hate every moment of it. It's a chore, an infuriating exercise in being railroaded and beaten down with endless gimmicks and gotcha level designs. But when I'm not playing it, I love it -- the flow of combat, the setpieces, the atmosphere. I guess maybe I like the concept of HL2 more than the game itself, as the game is bogged down by countless minor flaws that specifically grate against my tastes and desires vis-a-vis gaming.

Mana, on the other hand, I love while I'm playing. Despite all its glitches and sloppiness, the game is made of pure joy. But when I'm not playing it, all I can think about is the lousy programming and the weird animation and color choices and that stupid Dwarf Village theme and the grinding and...yeah. And so forth. Once I actually pick it up, though, I can play for hours on end.

These are the only two games for which I feel such powerful, polar sentiments. I wonder why that is.

category: games | forums | 29 comments | §

Some games you just weren't meant to beat

26 October 08 | 17:02 | Posted by: Kat

I'm never, ever going to get a chance to fight that thing. Whatever it is. And it's too bad, because I've always kind of liked shooters. Good old-fashioned shmups just kind of appeal to me. I think it's the intricate dance around the bullets, the adrenaline, and the wicked power-ups. Unfortunately, I've also come to realize that I'm really not all that good at them. Actually, check that: I really suck at shoot'em-ups. When it's me in one spaceship against the world, the world wins. Every single time.

That hasn't stopped me from trying, though. When I was a kid, I considered it an accomplishment if I made it past the third level of 1943 for the NES. I never did, of course, because that plane was a real bastard, and I always seemed to be out of fuel at the end of the level. Getting hit all the time does that to you.

It was the same story with R-Type Delta on the PlayStation. Great game, quite nice to look at, too hard for the likes of poor little me. And don't even get me started on Mars Matrix. That game was indeed bullet hell, and I was its chief damned soul. Now here I am with the Gradius Collection and Metal Slug, butting my head against that same old wall. You would have thought I'd learned by now.

I've had a quick run through all of the Gradius games now (well, except for Gradius III, mostly because Kishi's article made me actively terrified of it), and the results have been pretty consistent. I pick up some power-ups, start to move faster. "Hey," a voice in my head says, "maybe you can actually do this!" I've got some Options now, my lasers are filling the screen, and I'm popping those little alien bastards left and right. Then, all of the sudden, wall. Bang, I'm dead. Or bang, there's that phoenix at the end of Gradius II's first stage. Or that caterpillar thing in Gradius Gaiden. Or hell, pretty much any wall of bullets will do it.

Bang, bang, bang, you're dead. Game over.

But unfortunately for the citizens of the universe, I'm going to keep hopping into that cockpit. And when I'm done, I'm going to pick up an RTS. Or god forbid, a fighting game. I guess there are some games that I just can't quit.

category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

Opportunity cost

25 October 08 | 20:30 | Posted by: Levi

As the deluge of fall titles continues, I find myself unable to keep up with all the games that I want to play. It's not a bad problem to have, but it's got me thinking a fair bit about time management. Because I work in retail, this uptick in the amount of games being released conincides with my work load also increasing considerably. My free time is at its lowest when the amount of media I want to consume is at its highest.

As a dope who has invested in all three current-gen consoles as well as both portable platforms, the only thing stopping me from playing every game that looks good is time. Thanks to rental service Gamefly and the fact that I can borrow games from my place of employment, the normal inhibitor of cost isn't a consideration. However, I am strongly aware that every game I choose to play is another game I'm not playing. Every evening I spend playing a game is another film I'm not seeing, another book I'm not reading, another evening I'm not outside playing with the dogs, another evening I'm not devoting to spending time with my wife, another blog post I'm not writing for the site.

The only thing that even partially ameliorates the huge chunk of my free time that I am investing in gaming is that for most single-player games I can also listen to podcasts or audiobooks simultaneously, which at least offers me the illusion that I'm making productive use of my limited time.

I can't even imagine how much tougher it must be for those reading this whose jobs entail giving up a huge chunk of their free time. At least when I leave work at the end of an 11-hour day I'm done. For others, that "free time" is just time to get caught up on their work responsibilities.

This probably wouldn't be a problem at all if I just had patience. I feel a strong urge to play all these games while they are still current: part of the fun of this hobby for me is the discussion surrounding games and that's always at its peak while the game is in the afterglow of its original release. I listen to a wide variety of gaming podcasts, and they feed into this inclination I have by rarely discussing a game that's even a few weeks old. Is the internet to blame for the anxiety I feel looking at the over-stuffed game release schedule?

How do you guys manage your gaming time? Do you feel that your gaming hobby is preventing you from reading all the books or seeing all the movies or otherwise enjoying your non-gaming interests?

category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

Keeping it real

25 October 08 | 15:46 | Posted by:

John over at 61fps has posited a question of sorts: namely, is he the only one who doesn't really care for emulation?

It is nice to know I'm not alone.



I think Sharkey is consistently baffled when he casually talks about playing via emulation and I sort of shrug and say, "Eh." He finds nothing odd about having beaten preposterously tough games like Dracula X using arrows and the Tab button. To me, that sounds utterly horrible. I don't even really enjoy emulating with a good USB D-pad; games just don't feel right under emulation. Except really perfect emulation, like most of the Virtual Console systems -- and even then, I think much of the appeal is that the games are running in their "proper" environment. That is to say, running from a console to a television.

I'm not sure what it is, but I've come to realize that there is some ineffable quality to a real game played on a real system that even Virtual Console can't quite match. Maybe it's actually a lack of quality? The scanlines, the shoddy A/V-out technology, the constant risk that this will be the time your batteries conk out, or that you won't be able to make the contacts work right thanks to the NES's stupid spring-loading system. Et cetera. But no, there's something else -- something more primal. There's a certain feeling I have when I see an older game running on its native platform that I just don't have when the same software is downloaded as a ROM, or even as a standalone Wii Channel. It could very well be some sort of nostalgia, or simply a Pavlovian response to when these games were new and expensive and hard to come by and generally just precious, a feeling completely lost when you can download several hundred of them in an hour's time.

I suppose that's another part of what I've been trying to capture in the giant console purge-and-rebuilding program (pogrom?) I've undertaken of late: the sense of visceral presence in games. I even picked up a copy of Rockman 5 while I was in Japan despite being so thoroughly unimpressed with my emulated experience a few months ago; I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe if I play it the way nature intended -- on a cartridge, in a console, on a TV -- maybe I'll feel differently.

On the other hand, maybe this is all just me growing more demented in my old age.

category: games | forums | 42 comments | §

What's old is new again...again

24 October 08 | 18:54 | Posted by:

There's a lot of grumbling out there about pricing schemes for downloadable content, some of which is perfectly justified. No one wants to pay extra to unlock content on a disc they already own, for example, and can be frustrating to feel like game companies are squeezing you for money by splitting their product into tiny installments. So, to be honest, I was a bit irritated when I heard about the DLC for Mega Man 9, which seemed to do just that. I'd buy the Proto Man Mode, the extra stage, and Endless Mode, but there was no way I would pay for the extra difficult Hero and Super Hero Modes.

At least, that's what I told myself until I realized the new difficulty levels were only 100 Wii Points each.

At this point, I've downloaded all the extra content for this game, and I regret none of it. Not only that, but the higher challenge modes have far exceeded all my expectations. As you can see in the screenshot above, the difficulty is increased by flooding the screen with enemies and changing their placement to be more imposing, not simply making Mega Man weaker or making enemies more resistant to your attacks. Instead of just making the game tedious by adjusting damage values, Capcom took the time to rethink how the levels actually play.

So far, Hero Mode has kept me on my toes, letting me experience these stages again as if I were playing them for the first time; the revisions seem designed explicitly to trick overconfident players into making stupid mistakes. The first time I fell into a bottomless pit because the timing on a disappearing block puzzle had been slightly adjusted, I couldn't help but smile. It never feels cruelly difficult, but it's been altered just enough to force me out of relying on old patterns.

Even harder versions of Mega Man 9 definitely aren't for everyone, but I think 100 Wii Points is a pretty great deal for making this game feel new again.

category: games | forums | fifteen comments | §

Looking behind the curtain: EA and DLC

24 October 08 | 14:23 | Posted by:

I really wish Rock Band was a less interesting game. Really, I do, because I feel bad being the one writing about it so much on here. Unfortunately, few games have provided this many different points of discussion lately, and since I know you guys are hungry for something to read, you'll have to bear with me. At least you'll eventually figure out I'm barely talking about the game itself in these posts.

So, one of Rock Band 2’s lauded features was an additional twenty songs available for free download sometime after the game was released; the track list was announced this week. It's a common misconception that either (a) Harmonix is offering these songs later because they didn't have time to finish them before the game's certification, or (b) they wanted to ultimately offer up more tracks for RB2 than Activision is with Guitar Hero: World Tour. And while I'm sure those are both true, it's not the actual reason for the songs; GameStop is.

It's no secret that EA has been using the constant drip of free DLC in Burnout Paradise to keep people playing and cut down on the number of used copies showing up at GameStop. Similarly, the absolute flood of downloadable content for Rock Band is a great reason not to trade it in. With so many tracks (approaching 500 by the end of the year, I believe), everyone is going to find something they like, and once you start buying songs, why would you trade the game in and throw that money away?

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category: games | forums | 17 comments | §

Old dog, old tricks

23 October 08 | 22:50 | Posted by:

So, let's see. In the first two hours of Snatcher, I've encountered:

• a very literal instance of toilet humor;
  
• a self-referential in-joke;
  
• several corporate reference in-jokes;
  
• anachronistic references to the game's host platform;
  
• a dizzying juxtaposition of immersive design and fourth-wall-shattering jokiness.

Oh yeah. It's a Hideo Kojima game, alright.

category: games | forums | 26 comments | §

Hamster, meet wheel

23 October 08 | 19:38 | Posted by: Kat

I've talked before about my reluctance to "go next-gen" because I constantly feel behind on older releases. There's another side to that, though. Whenever I get a new system, I suddenly find myself staring down a whole new library of everything that I had missed over the past couple years or so.

I tend to be reminded of this phenomenon whenever I upgrade my computer, which happened again recently. Suddenly, all those games that were barely better than slideshows on my previous system actually become playable, which means I inevitably spend a weekend installing every game I've ever owned just to see how they run. When I'm done with that, I move into impulse buy territory.

Thankfully, Sins of a Solar Empire has so far been the only new PC game that I've purchased this year, which is good for both my conscience and my pocketbook. On the other hand, now I own a PSP-3000, too, which means that it's back to traversing that same, familiar minefield. I already have three games of varying quality for the thing, but here I am scheming to buy more. After all, I simply must own Mega Man: Powered Up, Gundam Battle Universe, and Macross Ace Frontier. God forbid I enjoy the games I already have.

This happens to everybody, though. You get a shiny new toy, and you feel compelled to indulge in the novelty, the newness. What you have here, my friends, are the wonders of consumerism. I just hope one day that I'll find it in me to take a deep breath and stop cluttering up my house with games that I probably don't have time to play. Until then though, I'll be right there will you on that big old capitalistic hamster wheel. Now, if you'll excuse me, I've gotta go finish preordering my copy of Gundam Vs. Gundam.

category: games | forums | fourteen comments | §

Lethargic like the wolf

23 October 08 | 15:19 | Posted by:

What's this? An envelope from Capcom? Why, it's probably just my well-deserved invitation to their...

Oh. It's those free replacement covers for Okami they were offering a while ago after that IGN watermark boondoggle. That's nice, I guess. And they included two double-sided covers instead of just the one I ordered. Rather thoughtful.

Wait a second, when did I order these? Kotaku says the promotion started April 23...I'll spot myself two days...that's 180 days...Google Maps says I'm about 380 miles from Capcom...carry the four...and it comes out to roughly 0.08796 miles per hour on average. I believe that's what The Oregon Trail qualified as a "leisurely pace."

Seriously though, it's not like I could complain. Truth be told, I didn't even buy Okami for the Wii, so I sorta fleeced Capcom out of a couple of free DVD covers. With this and one of those one-cent Activision white DVD cases, I'll have the prettiest Wii Sports case at the ball! Plus, this is way quicker than the free FLCL T-shirt I got that took thirteen months to arrive.

category: games | forums | nine comments | §

Those of you playing Dead Space...

23 October 08 | 09:22 | Posted by:

Do the main enemies...remind you of anything? Perhaps, while wandering through the darkened hallways of an abandoned space ship, you suddenly have the urge to buy a used car, or perhaps suspect some sort of major savings are to be had?

Here's a big hint:

category: games | forums | five comments | §

Why so furious?

22 October 08 | 22:33 | Posted by:

I posted a...well, I don't know that "defense" is the correct word, but definitely a something about Wii Music yesterday. The short of it is, I don't have any particular interest in the game...but I also don't see it as a clear and present danger to all that is good in the world, either.

Have self-proclaimed hardcore gamers always been this hysterical about "non-game" software? I feel like Wii Music is the latest in a long line of toys and apps that Nintendo has been churning out for years; nothing new in the least. Maybe it's because I wasn't lurking in the proper corners of USENET back then, but I really don't remember Mario Paint eliciting so much FUD back in the day; on the contrary, people seemed to love it, and it's still regarded fondly. While I was in Tokyo last week, I came across a set of Famicom Disk System titles that appeared to be Mario-themed lessons on sewing; for that matter, Nintendo even published (or at least played host to) a Game Boy application that could be used with a sewing machine to create special patterns. And let's not forget the Game Boy Camera, which was basically an add-on that let you do a simplified version of what the DSi promises to enable -- but people thought that was awesome, whereas the collective mindset regarding DSi's 0.3 megapixel camera is that it's the dumbest thing ever.



Nintendo's modus operandi doesn't seem to have changed so much over the years...is the problem simply that people who play games are becoming shriller and more egocentric?

category: games | forums | 42 comments | §

Choose your own Dragon Quest

22 October 08 | 15:17 | Posted by:

In typical Square Enix fashion, the new trailer for Dragon Quest IX on display at this year's Tokyo Game Show consisted mainly of cut scenes that were in no way reflective of what it will be like to actually play the game. However, hidden among the smoke and mirrors were a few brief seconds of footage that actually revealed a great deal about the basic gameplay systems of this long-delayed sequel. While these clips were so brief in the actual trailer that you could have easily missed them by blinking at the wrong time (even if you can read Japanese), the most significant drops of information that trickled out in this new footage are profiled in the newest issue of Famitsu.

The ability to customize the appearance of your characters was announced in the very first promotional trailer for this game over two years ago, but now we know even more about its character creation and customization. It's now official that there will be a job system, most likely based on the one used in Dragon Quest VI and VII. Even more significant is the revelation that you can recruit and customize a party of your choice at the tavern, like in Dragon Quest III.

Nothing announced so far explicitly precludes the existence of story-based characters in addition to the blank ones at the bar. It's also possible that the characters you recruit at the bar may have backstories rather than being purely generic. However, some circumstantial evidence also seems to indicate party and character systems closer to those found in dungeon hacks than in story-driven RPGs. For example, the cooperative play system makes a lot more sense if multiple players are working together with their unique generic party members than if the game has story-based characters.

While this is admittedly all speculation based on the incredibly limited amount of information Square Enix has released, don't be surprised if party formation in this entry in the series has more in common with Etrian Odyssey than Dragon Quest VIII.

category: games | forums | four comments | §

The blue album

22 October 08 | 08:26 | Posted by: eirikr

"God damn, this is funky."

Shortly after that thought, I pulled my headphones out of the CD player I was listening to so I could get up –- and dance. I mean, you should have been there to capture it on film; it was likely a pathetic sight perfect for YouTube, blackmail, or some convenient combination of the two. But I couldn't help but put my hands in my pockets and shuffle about on my two legs with a step here, a jimmy-leg there, two steps back, and a flip around short of a cheap date.

And here's the kicker: I was listening to the newly-released Rockman 9 Arrange Soundtrack.

In particular, the remix of "Hornet Dance," a tune so funky-fresh that I would have taken my strutting to the streets of my hometown of Baltimore, if I were still in Baltimore and had it not been three o'clock in the morning. But I could see it in my mind: by the time I reached the intersection of Pratt and Charles, I would have successfully promoted five different soft drinks with my suave stylings, annulled the foreclosures along three city blocks with my mondo move set, and charmed approximately a dozen foxy ladies back to my princely pad because damn if I wasn't one of the coolest, calmest, collected(est) cats this side of the Mason-Dixon.

Okay, so that situation would have never happened in a million years. But I'd be lying if I didn't say that mix of Hornet Man's theme made me feel like doing those exact things. Pretty powerful stuff for yet another Mega Man 9 tie-in product, but surely, its sexy beat had to be a fluke, right?

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category: media | forums | ten comments | §

Your eyes asplode

21 October 08 | 22:36 | Posted by:

I've just started watching the remastered Blu-ray version of Sleeping Beauty, and I had to stop and write this post because I am in disbelief that a 50-year-old movie can look this good. Sleeping Beauty has always been the most stylish of the Disney oeuvre, but now it's also the best-looking. It has the crispness and precision and purity of digitally-created animation, but also the soul and warmth of hand-drawn art. Seriously, wow. Even if you don't have Blu-ray, I imagine the remastered DVD transfer is every bit as good, just lower in resolution.

I have a feeling that this disc will become to Blu-Ray decks what Dark Side of the Moon is to CD players.

category: film | forums | fourteen comments | §

Back to the tower

21 October 08 | 13:53 | Posted by: Kat

I didn't realize it until recently, but The Gunslinger makes a peculiar bookend for my time here in Japan. The last time I picked it up, it was January 2006, and I was looking ahead, not back, to heading overseas. And now here I am, a couple months to go before I leave for good, and I'm back on the trail to the Dark Tower.

You could say that I didn't really "get" The Gunslinger the first time around. It's hard to digest a nuanced story when you're half-asleep at a security guard desk, and Roland's adventures make for some odd company on the night shift anyway. I came away bemused, hoping that it would get better, which it actually did. I rolled through the whole series all the way into Japan, and was treated to one of my favorite conclusions to a series ever at the end of a mostly depressing Dark Tower VII.

I found The Gunslinger difficult to judge, though. I couldn't decide whether it was actually dull and confusing, or if I had just missed the subtleties while reading it at three a.m. But on closer inspection, it seems like The Gunslinger isn't so much boring as it is the purest example of an emotion that pervades the entire series: loneliness. The Gunslinger is about one guy, the last of his kind, crossing a desert in a world that has essentially ended. You'd better believe that he's going to be lonely.

Once you embrace that melancholy atmosphere, Roland becomes sympathetic rather than distant. You start to notice all of the little details of Stephen King's "world that has moved on." It doesn't seem quite as clumsy or pretentious as it did before, and it's easy to understand Roland's world of broken dreams.

Weirdly enough, it's the same feeling that I get with Watchmen, which I also happen to be reading right now (nope, not finished with that one yet). They're both dark, introspective, and apparently intent on showing us the true nature of humanity. They're also both incredibly difficult pieces to adapt to film, but are getting movies anyway. But if it makes you feel any better, I have more faith in J.J. Abrams' vision for The Gunslinger than I do Zack Snyder's for Watchmen. At the very least, I expect that he'll get the emotions right. And I'm starting to think that the emotions are the most important part of Dark Tower.

In any case, I'm moving on to The Drawing of the Three, the second book in the Dark Tower cycle. This is where it starts to get "good." Here's hoping that holds true while my time here in Japan comes full circle.

category: media | forums | 17 comments | §

New Game Plus: Look who's coming to retail

21 October 08 | 07:17 | Posted by: reibeatall

Well, guys, this certainly is different. Yes, after over a year, New Games + is changing into something. Something...wordier.

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category: games | forums | 32 comments | §

New Game Plus: Data packets of love

20 October 08 | 22:40 | Posted by: sarcasmorator

You'll probably notice three things about this week's downloadable content update.

One: It's a double dose, because last week's didn't make it up. Two: The games here are without the company of their retail-shelf counterparts. Three: It's a blog post, which means I'm blogging! The last two things are connected, as you may have guessed; the eminently capable reibeatall and I have sundered our New Game Plus ties to become each of us a tiny nation unto himself. Join us in this new world order! And click through to see what you can download, already.

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category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

Add to Queue #61: The "super green" edition

20 October 08 | 19:00 | Posted by: Levi

Media | A2Q Archives | A2Q #61 | October 20, 2008: Welcome to Add to Queue, Levi's round-up of this week's US home video release highlights. Sorry, rest of the world. Region locks are the industry's way of saying they still don't understand the Internet.

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category: film | forums | twelve comments | §

One to scratch off the wish lists

20 October 08 | 09:22 | Posted by: Nicola Nomali

After being teased several weeks ago, today finally sees the Virtual Console release of Gradius II: Gofer's Ambition (better known as Gradius II, because no one wants to acknowledge that goofy subtitle). As much as you might question whether the VC needs yet another shoot'em-up, this one is genuine cause for celebration; with enticing thematic stages, amazing music and visuals, and the ability to select from a variety of power-up schemes, it's one of the most beloved games in the genre -- and a sterling example by which to judge its progeny. Aside from a limited arcade run in Europe and a handheld release on PSP, this is the first time it's been made available to Western gamers, too. If you still can't empathize, then for you old-school Square fans, imagine that Square Enix suddenly decided to haul off and localize Seiken Densetsu 3, and forego the forty-dollar DS release to sell it for nine bucks on VC. That's roughly the level of excitement shmup fans are feeling right now.

If anything, we thought we might get the Famicom port, which made interesting revisions to the arcade stages but frequently suffered from abysmal hit-detection (not entirely unlike the odious Gradius III). But we can rest easy, for this is the PC Engine CD version: nearly identical to the arcade original in both function and aesthetics -- not to mention putting the CD format to use with the rockingest animated intro of all time. If you have ever longed to Shoot the Core, or found yourself curious at the prospect of a "Ripple Laser"; if dodging dragons made of fire amidst a field of artificial suns sounds like a pretty good time (and it should); Gradius II will do you right.

So, so right.

category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

The Mega Man 9 effect

19 October 08 | 23:34 | Posted by:

I've mentioned before that I'm rebuilding my game collection a tiny piece at a time, mostly by acquiring complete box-manual-cart sets when I'm in Japan. The logic here: buying bare carts is cheap and easy and turns games into meaningless commodities, but complete they cost more and are harder to come by, and they take up more space. The result: I buy fewer selections, think harder about which ones I really want to own, and value the choices I make more. And unlike Americans, Japanese gamers actually take good care of their possessions, so it's not impossible at all to find just about every 8- or 16-bit game you can think of in great shape. And complete Japanese games are (with a few notable exceptions) a whole lot cheaper than their American counterparts in similar condition.

The only problem is that Japanese game prices are very volatile. Sometimes that means they come down rapidly in price, but in many cases they can skyrocket at the slightest provocation. Case in point: the Rockman series. While I was in Tokyo in August, I picked up the entire Rockman World series (aka the Game Boy Mega Man titles) for a grand total of about $100. Not bad considering that Mega Man V sells for more than fifty bucks on eBay for just a bare-ass cart; in Nakano it was ¥2100. I didn't have the money to pick up the Famicom Rockman games, which were selling for roughly the same price, so I decided to take care of that at TGS.

What I didn't count on was a massive burst of Rockman obsession due to the release of Rockman 9, which resulted in a huge bump in the price of the games I intended to pick up. The price on the Game Boy games was a good 50% higher than two months prior, and I couldn't even find the entire Famicom series. I found 3, 4 and 5 easily enough, and for decent prices, but the sole, sad, disintegrating boxed copies of 1 and 6 commanded prices upwards of $60, and Rockman 2 was nowhere to be found. So, uh, I bought a ridiculous amount of other Rockman merchandise instead. I'm pretty sure Capcom's booth was designed as a trap for me: Shirts! Posters! E-Tanks! Dolls! Notepaper! The R20 artbook! And they even released a Rockman 9 arranged album while I was over there to make matters worse. What a bunch of jerks.



Let this be a lesson to you: when you want to buy nerd stuff overseas, best to check for upcoming exercises in nostalgia-flogging. Apparently there's a genuine market price attached to these things.

category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

Mother knows best

19 October 08 | 16:10 | Posted by: christopher

When Mother 3 was released in 2006, I was barely playing video games anymore. A lack of time and money kept me away from the hobby during most of college, outside of occasionally checking this site to learn about any particularly interesting news. I was mostly reading it out of nostalgia, without any intention to play or purchase anything myself. Without even a TV in my tiny Japanese dorm room and my old Game Boy Advance still in America, my gaming was limited to the occasional round of Hot Shots Golf while drinking with friends. However, reading about Mother 3 at that time broke down all my resistance. Seeing its beautiful sprites awoke my long-dormant inner third-grader, who promptly threw a temper tantrum, disgusted that I had lived in Japan for nearly a year without having played any video games. I asked my family to send my GBA as soon as possible, and when it got here, I rushed to get a copy of Mother 3.

While I'm still not entirely sure if returning to this time-consuming hobby was actually a good decision, I do want to write a little about the game that brought me back and how it compares to Mother 2 (EarthBound).

(Please note that the text below the jump describes the gameplay and narrative structure of Mother 3 in general terms without spoiling specific details.)

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category: games | forums | thirteen comments | §

Moore is less

18 October 08 | 23:22 | Posted by:

I've been terribly hard at work this weekend struggling through the odious chore of sitting around watching old James Bond movies on Blu-ray. No, really, it's for work, honest.

It's been an enlightening experience; prior to this, the only Bond films I'd ever seen all the way through were a couple of the depressingly average Brosnan movies and the considerably more entertaining Casino Royale. (The Daniel Craig one, not the weird satire featuring Woody Allen.) Besides those, t