Uh oh, it's happening again

30 June 10 | 11:44 | Posted by:

"Surely there's gotta be at least an Agility Orb at the top of the Transamerica Pyramid," I thought to myself. "Now I just need to figure out how to get up there."

category: games | forums | fifteen comments | §

So I made a shirt

29 June 10 | 11:40 | Posted by:

And then I photographed it... badly. Apparently the iOS 4 update has turned my iPhone 3GS's camera function into junk. That's heartwarming!



Anyway, so yeah. I wanted to see what sort of quality I could expect from Spreadshirt.com, since I've heard good things about it. It seems pretty nice, actually. I need to give it a few runs through the wash to see if it's less likely to dissolve upon contact with water than Cafe Press apparel, but I like the print quality and the shirt options.

Is this design something people would actually wear on their bodies? I am curious. I realize T-shirts are pretty passé, now that the Internet T-shirt craze has passed... but people do request GameSpite/ToastyFrog shirts occasionally, so consider this an official query. Yes? No? Any designs you would particularly want to see? Should I just punch myself in the face and save everyone the embarrassment? You tell me.

category: blog | forums | 40 comments | §

Hey, it's TI nostalgia: Parsec

28 June 10 | 22:16 | Posted by:

Back in ye olden days of my using a TI/99-4A -- we're talking, like, 1983 here -- the one game I always clamored to play was Parsec. It had spaceships and lasers, you know. Throw in some dinosaurs or the A-Team and it would have been the greatest thing ever to scroll its way across a TV screen for me, back then.

I have fond memories of Parsec, despite those memories being awfully fuzzy and the strong likelihood that I never survived more than about 90 seconds in any given game. But hey, at least the controls made sense and pressing up made me go down. That was more than I could say for Zaxxon! My thoughts toward Parsec have mutated over the time, approximately thus:

• 1982-85: Oh my gosh this is like the coolest thing ever! I need to kill everyone else in the room so I don't have to take turns playing it.
  
• 1985-1995: [totally forgot about the existence of the TI-99/4A]
  
• 1996-2010: Huh, Parsec. That game was pretty much a Defender rip-off, right?
  
• 2010: Whoa, I can't believe this game actually existed on TI-99/4A. Th, that's nuts.

The 99/4A was not precisely a graphical powerhouse. Like a lot of other systems at the time, it featured a character-based display, so the concept of scrolling graphics were almost completely antithetical to its basic technology. There were quite a few systems released years later that couldn't scroll. Important systems, like the MSX! Systems from companies that are still alive, like the Sega SG-1000! And here was Parsec, doing a pretty darned good job of presenting gamers with a scrolling shooter.

It wasn't a great shooter, I'll give you that. But it also wasn't a total rip-off of Defender, either. Honestly, about the only thing it had in common with Defender was a spaceship that could fire a screen-length laser beam. Nah, this was a total knock-off of Scramble, except without the bombing and the different elevations of scenery. It kept the refueling feature, though! The trick here was that instead of bombing fuel depots to top up your gas (which, lets be honest, doesn't make much sense), you performed something more akin to a pitstop by flying through refueling caverns. These were really tricky, since they were extremely narrow and had uneven edges, and the game featured pixel-perfect collision. Scrape against a tiny outcropping in the depots and you were as dead as if you'd run out of fuel. To counterbalance this, you could adjust your ship's responsiveness -- it could move quickly to evade enemies, or slowly to allow fine control in tight situations.

Not exactly a masterpiece, then, but a thoughtfully consider shooter regardless with a few clever ideas to back up its fancy tech. Makes me proud to have cut my teeth on the TI, it does.

category: games | forums | eleven comments | §

A request for GameSpite Quarterly help

28 June 10 | 11:31 | Posted by:

Hey guys, I need some crowdsourcing help. I'd like to include a photo gallery of important NES peripherals and hardware in the next book, and I'd like to do the photography myself to make it all consistent and such. I am looking for people who are willing to lend me the necessary goods by mail. I will return them within a few weeks! I just need to take some photos. Here's what I need:

• NES Advantage - accounted for
  
• NES Max - accounted for
  
• Power Glove - accounted for
  
• R.O.B. (extra parts preferred but not essential) - accounted for
  
• Arkanoid controller - accounted for
  
• U-Force - accounted for
  
• NES model II console - accounted for
  
• A few early issues of Nintendo Power - accounted for

I can't offer anything besides my gratitude and a thanks in the indicia, but you will live forever with the soul-warming sensation of having helped with a noble deed. If you can help, drop me an email. Thanks!

category: gamespite | forums | | §

Instrumental in Texas

27 June 10 | 17:29 | Posted by:

I've been in full-bore GameSpite Quarterly writing mode this weekend, outside of those times wherein I've been doing, you know, legitimate work. The new issue is coming along quite nicely, although I'm having trouble figuring out how we're going to cram all of this NES 25th anniversary nostalgia into a single book. Blurb's format tops out at 420 pages, I think. That just might not be enough....

Anyway, trying to figure out the NES's place in history has set me to thinking about systems that predated it. No matter how hard I try, I can't seem to dislodge my conviction that the NES was gaming's pupal form, the system which ushered in a maturation from simple single-screen arcade games to incredibly deep adventures. Of course, depth in gaming certainly predated the NES! What made the NES important is the way it unified that depth with refined graphic design and streamlined interfaces.

That being said, I did spend my formative years in Lubbock, Texas, and that means I have an everlasting soft spot for Texas Instruments' bid to dominate home computing: The TI-99/4A.



The 99-4/A was one of a succession of microcomputers from TI, but honestly I know very little about its precursors. They never seemed to make the rounds. The TI-99/4A, on the other hand, was absolutely ubiquitous. Or rather, it was ubiquitous in Lubbock, because TI had a huge manufacturing plant there. I'm pretty sure they cut the Lubbock Independent School District some sort of crazy deal in an attempt to create community goodwill (or maybe just to net themselves a tax break). By 1984, it seems like every classroom in the city had a TI-99/4A. Of course, by 1984 I'm pretty sure TI had pulled out of the market altogether, so maybe we were just getting remaindered goods. Whatever!

The important thing is that we had computers. We could write BASIC programs on them. We could also play videogames. The latter was, admittedly, a lot more exciting than the former, though our teachers didn't seem to share our enthusiasm.

Like most computers of the era, the TI-99/4A's library hovered in a nebulous grey era of integrity. Most of its games seemed curiously familiar to anyone who spent time in the arcades, though the serial numbers had been filed down for the sake of plausible deniability. I mean, surely any similarity between shooting game TI Invaders and Taito's Space Invaders was just coincidence, right? And the maze-chase adventure Munch Man -- nothing at all like Pac-Man, and how dare you suggest otherwise!

We didn't care about the shifty software, of course. We just wanted to play some danged videogames with what should have been learning time. Also, Bill Cosby said the 99/4A was "the one," and who were we to argue with the vaguely prophetic proclamations of the man who brought us Jell-O Pudding Pops?

Later in life, I learned that the 99/4A was the first consumer-level 16-bit microcomputer, and that it shared common tech with gaming standards like the MSX and ColecoVision. So that's interesting and all. But I've never met many people who've shared my own experience with the computer, leading me to believe that it was ultimately a fairly localized phenomenon. Heck, I even attended a morning camp one summer where kids went to learn to program the 99/4A; my project was to have the computer render a drawing of the Tron logo and a light cycle, because, well, I was born a nerd. But that's probably a given now that I've revealed that I was excited about waking up at 7 a.m. to attend BASIC programming classes for a few weeks one summer.

I have to admit that I've never really regarded growing up in Lubbock as having been a prime opportunity for a cutting-edge technological experiences... but I suppose stranger things have happened than what I lived in that curiously specific period of time between 1981-1984.

category: games | forums | 24 comments | §

E3 omake

25 June 10 | 20:59 | Posted by:

I made good on my intention to sketch a bunch of different cartoon takes on E3 last week, but I'm sad to say I never found a use for this one. The image is certainly heavy-handed enough to get its point across -- mocking the industry's lemming-like rush to follow the unwanted trends of motion controls and 3D visuals -- but despite its shortcomings the 3DS did such a good job of making 3D a compelling sale that it took the wind out of my snark. Sails. My snark sails. Yes.

Anyway, lemmings and stuff. Hilarious!

category: games | forums | twelve comments | §

Some perspective on the 3DS

24 June 10 | 11:35 | Posted by:

Has it really been six years since Nintendo debuted the DS hardware at E3 to a hesitant press and grim forebodings? How far we've come. The 3DS's public debut last week at E3 was a far cry from its predecessor's first showing back at my very first E3. The new machine is a slick, solid piece of gaming hardware that wowed everyone. Seriously, I don't know a single person who wasn't impressed, and most of those people don't even like handheld gaming. Compared to the E3 2004 prototype DS, a sorry-looking piece of cheap plastic whose value was difficult to communicate, the 3DS might as well be from a different company altogether.

I took a little time to photograph my favorite version of the 3DS, the glossy orange one. This color is much too classy for Nintendo of America to actually release here, so I wanted to capture evidence that it did exist once we're given our generous choice of black and electric blue.



It's heartening to see so many people -- i.e., pretty much everyone -- enthralled by the 3DS. It's like a vindication of handheld gaming, almost. Maybe American gamers will actually take it seriously now! On the other hand, the only other time in history that press and industry folks have seemed unanimously positive about a portable console was back at the PSP launch, and well all know how that turned out. Nintendo's made a good first impression, but the company's been riding on top of the world for a while. If they slip, it's a long and painful tumble down to the bottom.

So, let's manage our expectations for the 3DS, shall we? It's cool, it's powerful, and it offers something new and exciting, yes. But the 3DS isn't perfect, and it's probably not a bad idea to take a tally of the complaints we're going to see about the system once it's actually out in the wild and in gamers' hands. Avowed wet blankets can prep for their parade-raining attacks now; determined fanboys can start fortifying their bulwarks. This is a small public service I like to provide.

1. 3D doesn't really add anything to games

This will, of course, be a matter of debate, because for some people the illusion of depth is intrinsically a value-added proposition. Beyond the cool factor -- which, admittedly, has done a damn fine job of selling even staunch cynics on the machine -- it's hard to imagine 3D visualization having a material impact on gameplay. Even if it could, I don't know that it can realistically happen when there's a depth slider on the side of the hardware to turn the effect off, meaning that games will have to work both with and without 3D. Add to that the fact that Nintendo has already said the 3D effect shouldn't be used by kids under seven since it will make them go blind as their brains explode or whatever and ultimately what you have is a very fancy graphical embellishment and nothing more. That will be more than enough for many gamers, but I bet there'll be quite a few people who want something a little more substantial from their new tech.

2. The 3D effect doesn't always work for people with vision problems

I approached the 3DS with great skepticism, because my awful eye problems (I'm a recovered amblyopic, and I have one farsighted eye and one nearsighted) make 3D effects extremely difficult for me to visualize. I've seen just one 3D film in the theatres so far, and it left me with a serious headache. My first impression of the 3DS was extremely positive, because it worked for me without a problem. But later I realized that first demo was a sort of "optimal situation" sort of deal, looking at a lot of still images. Once I tried some hands-on demos on the show floor, I found the 3D to be hit-and-miss. Once objects are in motion, my eyes strain a bit to make sense of the depth, and in some cases I can barely see the 3D at all. Our friend John Ricciardi had even worse luck; he wasn't able to see the 3D even in those optimal demos. I still find 3DS a lot more pleasant to look at than everyone else's 3D fakery, since it doesn't make everything look dark and washed out like those stupid glasses do, but I foresee myself turning that depth slider down fairly often.

3. The screen has a terrible, terrible angle of viewing

The elephant in the room, and the reason Nintendo was adamant that no one film 3DS games directly off the screen. This is going to be the system's make-or-break issue. The trick to the 3DS's visualization technology is that it (apparently) layers two screens one on top of the other. When you look at it straight-on, it looks like 3D! But tilt the machine even just a couple of degrees from dead-on and suddenly the illusion shatters and what you see is two ghost images rather than a single unified "solid." Look at it from a side-on, over-the-shoulder perspective and it's even worse. In a sense, the 3DS is the conceptual opposite of the DSi XL; the latter was purportedly designed to be a system that encourages people to gather round a single system and watch, but try doing that with the former and everyone's going to see something very ugly unless the depth slider is set to "off." More crucially, though, the 3DS's visual effect can break even for the person using the system if they don't hold it very, very carefully. I found that the natural movement of my hands and head during a fast-paced action game like Starfox 64 caused the system to move out of alignment for me. I wonder what impact this will have for long-term play; if you have to hold the system very carefully at a precise angle, it's going to become very tiring very quickly... to say nothing of the fact that the games which stand to benefit most from 3D visualization are the ones most likely to cause you to get you into the action and let your angle of viewing drift.

4. Hey wait, it's pretty much just a DS whose top screen has been replaced by a PSP

There's already a lot of debate about just how powerful the 3DS really is. My first impression was PSP quality... and then I saw Kid Icarus Uprising and Metal Gear Solid 3D in action and upgraded my opinion to "maybe even Wii level!" Later, I gave it some more thought and realized that the graphics seem to lack any sort of antialiasing, and that by and large the polygon models I've seen so far are roughly on par with PS2 at best. Ultimately I decided that it's stupid to fuss about direct comparisons, because it's kind of pointless; the only important question is whether or not games look great on the built-in screens, which they do. Still, the best way to explain the 3DS in terms of horsepower is that Nintendo basically added a DS's touch screen beneath a PSP -- heck, even the button layout is practically identical to a PSP's, except that the analog nub and D-pad have been swapped around. That's fine by me if it means we get games on par with Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker, but I wonder if it will fly with HD addicts once the 3D honeymoon is over?

5. All the colors Nintendo will release in North America are gonna suck.

I know. It is always thus. But at least we have our memories:



Good times, good times.

Let me stress again that this is not a post hating on the 3DS. You know me -- I love playing portable games much more than sitting in front of a TV. Handhelds are intimate, personal, and offer way more flexibility. I've always been 1UP's biggest advocate of portable gaming; I even gave the DS a fair shake back when it was widely regarded as a crappy last-ditch effort to compete with PSP. I'm absolutely excited for 3DS and the prospect of playing all the DS's best games (and new ones) with better visuals and built-in communications features. That being said, the sheer adulation being heaped on 3DS after E3 is probably setting expectations for the system a little too high. It's not going to change the world or anything, and it's hardly without its drawbacks. Consider this a dose of measured enthusiasm from a fan. 3DS is gonna be great... just don't expect it to be handheld Jesus come to rapture you away to gaming heaven or anything.

category: games | forums | 34 comments | §

Looking Pac

22 June 10 | 21:31 | Posted by:

Frank Cifaldi dug up the most amazing thing today: Photos of Toru Iwatani's Pac-Man concept sketches, including map and monster pattern layouts (above) and pixel designs for the little yellow guy himself. I've spent most of the day boggling at the fact that this article went practically unnoticed by most people; I guess it didn't have enough booth babes and 3DS tethergirls? So it goes, I suppose.



This is the most fascinating videogame thing I've seen since... hmm, I guess since that Iwata Asks where Shigeru Miyamoto showed off similar graph paper sketches of the original Legend of Zelda. This is literally a medium's blueprints, a look at the construction of one of gaming's most important and iconic creations. It's especially fascinating in a case like this -- Pac-Man is such an incredibly simple game, so all the conceptual changes it underwent are an insightful look into how the process of game design got its start. The early maze layout above is interesting for the way it artfully integrates the score display into the play area... but at the same time, the maze itself looks kind of painful to play. The little boxed in areas on either side are especially terrible, seemingly existing for the sole purpose of killing players. No thanks, Mr. Puck-Man, sir.

You have to wonder how many iterations the game's layouts underwent through the months before its final build. There were tons of Pac-Man inspired maze games back in the early '80s, and none that I've ever played were half as enjoyable as the real thing. One kind of assumes Iwatani and his associates burned through stacks of graphic paper, working and reworking the maze layouts until they were perfect.

Are most people just not interested in this? I wonder. Maybe it's because I'm all old and stuff. Seeing the prototype outlines for a game that was such a cultural force when I was a very impressionable young man is like seeing the raw clay of my childhood. It's kind of amazing! I would kill to dig through those reams of graph paper.

Yes, kill. I told you the violence of modern videogames is a bad thing, but did you listen?

category: games | forums | 28 comments | §

Work is its own reward

21 June 10 | 21:25 | Posted by:

Well, work is its own reward for today, anyway. After weathering the tiring hell of E3, I'm making up for the show's stresses by spending the next week or two immersing myself in the oh-so-toilsome drudgery of reviewing Dragon Quest IX and Crackdown 2. I'm told the latter game has it all! I can't confirm that statement, despite supposedly having made it, because our review copies haven't quite arrived. I suppose I could download the demo that went up today, but honestly I'd rather just wait and play the final product fresh. With friends. Blowin' things up.

It's funny, but when people learn what I do for a living, they invariably say, "You play videogames all day? That must be nice." Which is horribly mistaken. Every once in a while, though, that off-base assumption turns out to be correct. Thank goodness for these rare moments of enjoyment!

My only complaint about Dragon Quest IX is that the online shopping network component -- the DQVC, har har -- isn't up and running yet, so I can't cheese my way through by tricking out my crew with super awesome out-of-depth gear. Alas!



I've been impressed by DQIX's localization so far. It seems to strike a good balance between quirky slang and being comprehensible for people who aren't steeped in idiomatic British dialects. Which is to say, the accents and dialects are used much more sparingly than in even Dragon Quest V, at least from what I've seen.

The game has no shortage of puns, though! Really terrible puns. The kind of cheesy puns that your dad makes. (Yes, your dad. I've heard him. They're awful.) I've mentioned before that the Dharma Temple is now Alltrades Abbey, and that the Abbot is named Jack of Alltrades. What I didn't mention is that the monster in the image above, which is tied in with the Alltrades quest line, is called the Master of Nu'Un. Brilliant. In a corny sort of way.

But then again, today someone at the office commented that a demo video of Ubisoft's Your Shape looked like "Wii Fit, except French." To which I responded, "Wouldn't that be Oui Fit?" So... maybe I'm a poor judge for this sort of thing. Yeah.

Edit: I've just accepted a quest to pilfer mummy bandages. The quest's title? "Wrapper's Delight." I stand in awe of the superior corniness of Plus Alpha, or whoever localized this thing.

category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

GSQ4: Welcome to the Neverhood

20 June 10 | 08:48 | Posted by:

The Neverhood: Quirk, Strangeness, and Charm
Hey guys, remember GameSpite Quarterly? Yeah. I'm gonna wrap up posting the most recent issue as we move into the next. Today we have Mike Zeller's look at The Neverhood, a game that always made me regret not owning a PC back in the day. The title of this article is a skewed reference to Hawkwind, but please don't hold my poor judgement against this fine write-up.

In a totally random coincidence, Ray stuck a Neverhood tune in today's episode of Sound Test. This means you are obligated to listen to it.

category: games | forums | two comments | §

Over the line

19 June 10 | 08:59 | Posted by:

Last weekend, I had dinner with my fiancée's mother. She spent a good part of that meal talking about how harrowing it had been living in war-torn Vietnam through four decades of conflict before finally emigrating to America in the '70s. She talked about being forced to seek bomb shelters daily during the Japanese bombings of World War II, about her uncle who didn't make it to a shelter on time and was literally eviscerated by shrapnel from a Japanese bomb. She told me that before her uncle's younger brother could bring his body home, he had to gather the dead man's scattered organs and shove them indelicately back into his abdomen. She explained how terrifying the Tết Offensive was, since America's war in Vietnam was largely restricted to the countryside; no one had expected the conflict to come to the cities, least of all on a holiday for which a cease fire had been declared.

A day later, I found myself sitting in a press conference in Los Angeles, watching a couple of guys demo a videogame on a wall-sized screen. Their avatars hijacked a Russian helicopter, guns blazing, then took off from a jungle clearing before peppering villages of Vietnamese shanty huts with turret fire and missiles.

With the previous day's conversation fresh in my mind, it made for an uncomfortable juxtaposition -- one that that no one else in the theatre experienced, of course, but no less unsettling for its specificity. What are videogames if not an experiential medium whose greatest strength is the way they adapt to everyone's individual approaches and yield so many different results?

Honestly, I don't even remember which game was being demoed -- Medal of Honor? Black Ops? All the shooters I saw at this week's conferences kind of blurred together for me in a stream of non-stop explosions and guns and "ripped from the headlines" power fantasies... and my rigid E3 schedule and general lack of sleep certainly didn't help. I think it was the former, but I suppose that doesn't matter so much as what I do remember... namely, the sensation that the games industry has forgotten how to communicate by any means other than screaming at the top of its lungs about the awesomeness of lovingly rendered gore.



I get that violence is a part of videogames; it always has been. Arguably the first videogame ever was Computer Space, which consisted of using detailed physics models to blow up someone else's spaceship. Most of the games I enjoy are fairly violent as well, or at least use conflict as their primary mechanic. After thinking about it for most of the past week, I've come to the conclusion that what upsets me about most of this year's E3 press conferences is that most of them opened up by focusing on games that cross a line. It's an invisible, but it's one that -- for me, at least -- is very real. It's a line built of motivation, of intent, of tone. The near side of the line is a place where violence exists as a means to an end; on the far side, violence is the end in and of itself, and the goal is to explore it with sociopathic abandon.

This is, of course, the point at which everyone comes out of the woodwork to tell me I'm a puritanical idiot who doesn't understand the concept of escapism, which is to be expected. But my gaming tastes have always been defined to some degree by that invisible line. I couldn't stomach Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain when I realized that the game forces you to survive by killing innocent people who have been chained up in dungeons; I couldn't find any joy in the premise of Wild 9, whose advertising tagline gushed about how thrilling it is to torture enemies. That same part of me watched Cliff Bleszinki present Bulletstorm with increasing unease as he showed off the game's focus on brutally slaughtering random bad guys in increasingly violent ways to the accompaniment of sub-comic-book tough-guy dialog. Shortly before that, the part of me that plays through every Metal Gear Solid game with the MK-22 tranquilizer gun as my primary weapon and could only watch the Rising trailer with horror as Raiden visibly cut human enemies into graphically rendered meat slices.

(Incidentally, the first thing I asked in our Rising roundtable interview is whether or not it's actually possible to take a non-lethal approach to the game. Supposedly, you can; disarming human enemies -- and not literally dis-arming them, I mean by destroying their weapons -- is a valid tactic, while the game will provide lots of robot foes in order to give you things to cut more directly without feeling bad about it. So that's something, I guess.)



I really enjoyed Sam Keith's The Maxx in high school, and a sequence in the comic's sixth issue has stuck with me over the years. The protagonist is ambushed by an assassin named Mako, who sets about pummeling Maxx as the scene cuts back and forth to a conversation about violence in the media; meanwhile, the comic's villain (of sorts), Mr. Gone, narrates the Maxx/Mako battle, editorializing on the manipulative nature of how violence is presented: "An' here's where th' hero is trapped! The evil villain is unstoppable! Look how strong he is! How powerful! 'Fight back!' we scream. 'Don't just take it! Fight back!'" And of course, the villain wails on the hero until a turning point is reached and the hero is finally able cut loose in retaliation -- but his own use of violence is of course fully justified by all that's been inflicted on him, so we can feel good about him resorting to the same means as the bad guy, because the bad guy deserves it.

Terry Pratchett touched on the same topic in The Fifth Elephant as surly-but-good guy Sam Vimes barely survives a werewolf's game of cat-and-mouse (er, dog-and-mouse?) and is eventually forced to kill the villain out of desperate self-protection. At that moment, Vimes rejects the urge to make an action hero quip as he strikes the fatal blow, aware that the moment he takes pleasure in the act he's reduced himself to a monster, same as the villain.

For me, those are two defining statements on the role and nature of violence in the media, and they're all the more effective for the way in which they're delivered in the context of media. I don't know that anyone's ever done the same thing with gaming, though -- BioShock's golf club sequence is the closest thing that comes to mind, or maybe The Sorrow in Metal Gear Solid 3, which is a shame given how thoroughly violence is woven into the fabric of gaming. You'd think someone would have stepped back and said, "Wait, here's another way." Unfortunately, it's clear from E3 that games are still very much in their creative adolescence, and that no one's really questioning why violence is so intrinsic to the medium -- for the moment, the only question anyone seems to be asking is, "How much more over-the-top can we make the killing aspect of our game?"

I don't question that there was a lot of creativity on display in this year's E3 demos! But so much of it was centered around interesting new ways to pierce, dismember, and brutalize the bodies of enemies, and that bothers me. It's one thing for a game like, to take an example from my current playlist, Persona 3 Portable to send you into a dungeon every midnight to slay demonic shadows that threaten to consume the world of the living, and quite another thing altogether to earn bonus point for chasing down a mutant who's running from you in terror and killing it by emptying a machine gun into its anus. (Achievement unlocked: "Fire in the Hole.") One of these places the player in the role of protector, the other in the role of psychopath. Personally, it's not a jump I'm comfortable making.

I realize it's pointless for me to write about this, though. People already have opinions, and they're not about to sway one way or another because of a blog post. People who agree will say, "Right on!" while those who don't will tell me to chill out, lighten up, grow a brain/spine/sense of humor, etc., etc. It's a shame, because I'd like to see a rational dialog on this subject, but the change can ultimately only come from within the medium... and as long as there's money to be made from pushing boundaries, those boundaries will continue to be pushed. And hey, fair enough; there's range for all manner of expression in the medium. My concern is that, at the moment, this freedom expression seems to be weighted disproportionately toward a particularly vicious end of the spectrum.

Here's hoping for a little balance sooner than later. In the meantime, I guess I'll just dwell here on the boring, puritanical side of the line and watch the happenings on the other side with dismay.

category: games | forums | 69 comments | §

E3: A survivor's tale

18 June 10 | 09:05 | Posted by:

I lived through E3, and I've escaped, and you can't make me go back. At least, not until next year.

It was a strange show. My first impression was that it was horrible, thanks to a few awful press conferences. Then the show proper opened and I had the impression that it was like a classic E3, all color and light and interesting games to look at. That turned out to be an illusion, unfortunately; it just happens that I was assigned to cover things at Nintendo, Microsoft, Konami, and Square, which comprised about half of the really worthwhile booths at the show floor. Once I had time to take a proper look around I quickly realized that the big, impressive corporate displays were pools of excellence within a desert of mediocrity.



But still, hey, excellence. Sure, Nintendo subsisted almost entirely on shoveling up familiar brands, but they did a lot of new with those franchises. There's a rather angry thread in Talking Time this week about how stupid it is that Kirby: Epic Yarn is a Kirby game since it drops so many familiar mechanics of the Kirby series... which is kind of missing the point. Canvas Curse wasn't exactly classic Kirby, either, but it used the malleability of the Kirby character -- both physical and conceptual -- to do something amazing. More to the point, who cares? This show was brimming with rehashed, retread content, and Epic Yarn was a breath of fresh air. It's basically Nintendo creating an indie game... which is admittedly a contradiction in terms, but what I mean is that like so many small indie projects, Epic Yarn seems to take a single idea and explore it to the absolute fullest extent possible, presenting brilliant twists on top and eschewing the extraneous. The difference between Kirby and an indie game, of course, is one of resources, and this is a gorgeous game with amazingly fluid and solid animation. It honestly looks like a crafts project come to life. Amazing.



Konami has its own indie-like project, too: Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, which is exactly the recycled multiplayer DS Castlevania game rumors suggested it would be. Much as it seemed like a terrible idea, playing it made me realize that it's actually a lot of fun. Like I said in my preview, IGA's crew needs to come up with some cool gameplay hooks to justify the brazen recycling... but it has potential, which is something I wouldn't have expected before trying it. (The company's other indie-esque project was Hudson's Lost in Shadow, which looks achingly similar in atmosphere and spirit to Ico -- I wanted to try it, but the kiosks were always occupied. And always by Japanese press, curiously enough.)

At the other end of the indie spectrum is Halo: Reach. I know Halo tends to be love-it-or-hate-it around here, but speaking as a fan this really does seem to be more or less the definitive take on the game. What I've seen maintains the polish of Halo 3/ODST but restores the scope of environments and sense of devious enemy AI that made Combat Evolved so amazing in its day.

And finally, I didn't get to play Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday, but I saw it in action and it looks really interesting -- Square Enix creating a Peace Walker style shooter. Granted, Square doesn't exactly have the best track record when it comes to action games (cough, Dirge of Cerberus), but 3rd Birthday looks miles beyond their previous efforts. Any game that evokes visions of both Metal Gear and Omikron can't be all bad, right?

And honestly, those were the bulk of the interesting games I saw this year. Which isn't to say there weren't more! They problem is that they either had prodigious lines or were strictly being shown behind closed doors (which was also the case for 3rd Birthday and Reach, actually), and I didn't feel like bugging PR people for a line-jump. It's kind of weird that E3 has become so secretive about big games -- a closed-door event in which the biggest titles are hidden behind other closed doors.

I guess it wouldn't do for just anyone to get a glimpse of how the big publishers are sinking tens of millions of dollars into shuffling around the same familiar genre mechanics into slightly new configurations.

category: games | forums | 19 comments | §

I am definitely too old for this... stuff.

16 June 10 | 08:26 | Posted by:

Yeah, so I think I've reached my "sell by" date as a person who writes about videogames. This E3 has been exhausting, and I barely even had time to write anything about it until last night. It always seemed so easy in the past. Off to the glue factory for me, I suppose. Normally by now I've slammed together a 15-20 solid write-ups, but this year I'm scrabbling desperately just to reach the double digits -- but I can't really claim quality over quantity. Oh well! At least the games I've been looking at have been good, although I ended up being typecast as the Nintendo Booth Guy again. My own fault, I guess, for insisting I have the chance to go to the mats with 3DS.

Speaking of which, it's amazingly good! My impression of the 3D screen isn't quite as positive as my initial thoughts since I've seen more games in action*, but at the very worst I simply don't see the 3D and hit the slider the turn off the visualization to create what amounts to a better-looking-than-PSP portable game. No real downsides, there.

Anyway, here's what I've had time to see this week:

• Metroid: Other M. No real surprises with this one. It's Metroid, by Team Ninja, and was more or less the same as it was in March... if perhaps a bit prettier than its last viewing.
  
• Golden Sun: Dark Dawn. Meh, Camelot. This is the most average and unremarkable game I've seen by far. But then, I've avoided anything with Sonic in it.
  
• Donkey Kong Country Returns. I liked the original Donkey Kong Country... for a few levels, and then I got bored. But I like what I've seen of Retro's take on the series. Maybe I will grow jaded after a few levels of this one, too. Who knows?
  
• The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. This is pretty dang good! I liked the vaguely impressionist aesthetic even before Miyamoto revealed it was inspired by Cézanne, who's always been my favorite artist of that particular movement.
  
• Shigeru Miyamoto and co. on Nintendo's current lineup. Featuring occasionally pithy remarks.
  
• And... a piece on Halo: Reach's Firefight mode. Which one of these is not like the others? I'm really bummed about this article, because I had to travel to an event to check out this news and then leave immediately to do the write-up, meaning I missed my chance to meet Nathan Fillion. I just started re-watching Firefly a couple of days ago, so maybe it's just as well. I probably would have done something uncharacteristically fannish and blown my carefully cultivated public persona of unflappable bemusement.

And then the two genuinely valuable things I've written:

Kirby's Epic Yarn. Remember the beginning of Kirby's Adventure, where it tells you how to draw Kirby? Imagine if they had stopped at the outline portion, and the outline had been made of yarn. The genius of this game is that the arts-n-crafts look is more than just fancy visuals; it permeates the level design and the game mechanics. It's such a great, inventive take on the classic platformer! I haven't talked to anyone who hasn't been impressed. By Kirby! That's just crazy.

The industry's couch trip. This is probably something I will be exploring in more depth in the coming months. Not that I want to beat a dead horse. But I guess that would be totally in keeping with the Epic Games style! Except in addition to beating the dead horse, you'd get bonus points for dismembering and mutilating it in "cool" ways. Bulletstorm: The kegstand of videogames™!

Well, now it's time to do... stuff.

* Incidentally, Alice Liang wrote about half of those impressions. Not sure why I got the solo credit.

category: games | forums | thirteen comments | §

Now printing: GameSpite Year One, Vol. 2

13 June 10 | 08:31 | Posted by:

It's a couple of weeks late, but the second print volume of collected GameSpite articles is now up online for sale at Blurb. It's available in both paperback and hardcover formats. Unlike with the Quarterlies, though, the only difference between the two editions is that the hardcover edition has a much nicer cover and a dust jacket. Otherwise, they're the exact same 352 of compiled writings. Technically this makes it two pages shorter than Year One, Vol. 1, but the fact is that the new book has far more content since I've switched over to PDF format, allowing me to work with much denser text and use the full expanse of the page (Blurb's BookSmart program forces ridiculously huge page margins and needlessly expansive leading on users, presumably to pad page count).

In addition to the other half of the GameSpite articles form 2007-2008 which weren't collected in the first book, this volume also includes a ton of older archived articles on Mega Man and Metroid, culled from more than a decade of site archives, as part of fairly expansive sections on those two series. Many of the older articles aren't readily available online, and in dredging them from my hard drive I've taken this opportunity to do some surgery on them so they're better reads than they were ten years ago. I ended up scrapping one article altogether at the last moment, because it was irredeemably annoying. So, now I can say with confidence that this book is brimming with Good Stuff.

The paperback edition is $21 (more than the Quarterlies, but $2 less than Year One, Vol. 1) while the hardcover is $40 (a whole lot less than the limited run of Year One, Vol. 1 hardcovers sold for). This is in stark defiance of the upward trends of costs in modern America. I plan to offset this with extensive paid DLC, including three new maps and a set of horse armor. I'm not sure how those will work with a book, exactly, but I'll figure something out.

Anyway, it looks like Blurb will be down for part of this morning, which is awesome timing. And I'm sure this will be completely lost in the E3 hubbub. But hey, it's a book. Yup.

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

Nintendo Power cover spoils new Sonic game

11 June 10 | 10:25 | Posted by:

So, based on the cover of the new issue of Nintendo Power, I think I've figured out the final boss of the new Sonic game, Sonic Colors:

Prostate cancer.

Seriously, check out his pose. If the position and pose of that left hand doesn't say, "Turn your head and cough!" I'll be a monkey's uncle. I think I'll be passing on this one based on the inevitable minigames alone.

Still, at least we can be grateful it's arriving before the 3D visualization boom begins in earnest.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

Cooking up something strange

09 June 10 | 16:20 | Posted by:

The world's first-ever (and presumably only-ever!) 1UP/BakeSpite collaborative project is live and online. Annoyed as people get when I write about videogames, I figure it's gonna pale next to the hateful remarks that people will lob in the direction of an article that has practically nothing whatsoever to do about games.

I'm actually a little bemused that this article appeared on 1UP to begin with. When I agreed to it, I figured it should probably be reserved for BakeSpite, because Nintendo provided the food and I wanted to avoid the inevitable "lol moneyhats" nonsense. Also, because (as previously mentioned) it's pretty much just about cooking, and has very little to do with gaming. But, Sam wanted it to be a 1UP piece. So there it is.

I suppose if this article is a huge hit, we'll be writing about food far more often! But since that won't actually be the case, chances are good that this is simply a bizarre anomaly. I encourage you to check it out, because I doubt we'll ever run another feature even vaguely similar to this.

category: games | forums | six comments | §

Peace walking forward by traveling backward

08 June 10 | 14:44 | Posted by:

Well look at what we have here: A review of Peace Walker. And a favorable one, too! Provided you're not spoiling for a fight to defend the honor of a videogame from some mean ol' reviewer who obviously hates Metal Gear, what you'll take away from the review is:

• This is a really good game! Surprisingly good, in fact.
  
• There is a lot of substance to the game.
  
• The emphasis on multiplayer can be distracting, but it doesn't break the game.
  
• The narrative probably won't make you cringe, for once.

I still have a lot of Peace Walker left to play, truth be told. The story mode is probably a good 15 hours of play time, and if you're like me and tackle all the side missions as they become available and focus on recruitment for your base, that'll pretty much double the time to reach the ending. All of that and I've still only seen maybe... a third of the total game, probably? Granted, everything left to be done is extra, post-game content, but it's all really fun and I'm looking forward to it. Just as soon as I've reviewed Dragon Quest IX....

What I find most striking about Peace Walker, though, is that Kojima Productions has largely revitalized the series by taking what could be argued as a massive step backward. Metal Gear Solid was an amazing game in 1998, largely because of how it seamlessly married interactivity to narrative. It was a game that felt like a dynamic movie in a way that no one else had ever achieved at the time, despite the existence throughout the '90s of an entire sub-industry dedicated to accomplishing precisely that. Here in 2010, Peace Walker achieves greatness by distancing itself from its narrative, breaking the entire story into small chunks, dividing the game into discrete, self-contained missions, and basically emphasizing its intrinsic game-ness in every way.

It's a weird sort of evolution for the series to take, although this certainly isn't the first time Metal Gear has gone in this direction. Still, Peace Walker's design and structure are significant, because it's a game that has been treated, for all intents and purposes, as the next chapter of the franchise. It's entirely possible that Peace Walker's bite-sized design is simply a trend-jumping act of desperation to keep the series relevant in an increasingly unfriendly Japanese market, but I wonder if that's really the case. More likely, I think we're seeing an increasing amount of polarization in game design, with developers feeling pressure to make a choice between all-encompassing cinematic immersion or smaller, more manageable formats. Metal Gear helped pave the way toward the former, but the cost of entry to creating that sort of experience is growing steeper by the year. So, now Kojima and crew are exploring the latter.

Who knows; maybe Peace Walker is just a crazy, random abberation. Or maybe it represents the bigger picture, but only on the Japanese side of things. But I would be perfectly OK with it being part of an industry-wide trend toward developing games that focus less on being a Grand Blockbuster Experience and more on giving players lots of interesting things to do without trying to pretend that you're doing anything more than playing a videogame.

This medium needs to take a little more pride in what makes it unique, and Peace Walker is the first time a major production helmed by Hideo Kojima -- the poster child for gaming's Hollywood aspirations -- has taken an active step away from filmic narrative and immersion in favor of good old-fashioned playability. Nothing would make me happier than to see this sort of thing catch on and for games to get back to being games. Who cares if videogames are Art? As long as they're videogames, they're a form of entertainment wholly separate from any other. So here's to Peace Walker and its bold act of self-acceptance.

category: games | forums | sixteen comments | §

A tribute to Sony's hardware engineering

06 June 10 | 13:30 | Posted by:

Racing to review a game before a deadline is nothing unusual; that's just kind of how it goes, really. A game like Peace Walker shows up a few days before it launches and the review embargo lifts, and we little media monkeys scramble to cover it as quickly as possible. Not my favorite way to play, especially with a game like this -- it's crammed with optional material and supplemental content -- but such is life.

Much less common is a race against hardware obsolescence to review a game, but I guess that's just the magic of Sony engineering! My PSP-2000, bought in 2007 and used only occasionally, has decided it no longer wishes to fight the good fight, and now the video system is going. It started a couple of days ago with a faint vertical band at the left side of the screen, which I just assumed was a stylistic visual element unique to Peace Walker. But then I discovered the band would appear even in the XBM and other games, and now it's spread. So what should look like this:


...looks more like this:


So that's pretty awesome. The visual defects are getting worse by the hour, so I'm literally rushing to finish the game while I still can.

For fun, here's a brief history of my experience with Sony hardware over the past 13 years!

• 1997: Bought a Sony PlayStation. Two years later it lost the ability to play FMVs and often refused to load content without the system being upended.
  
• 2000: Launch-model PlayStation 2. Early in 2003, the drive door decided to jam. With Xenosaga in the drive, just to make the injury sting a little more!
  
• 2004: Bought a slimline replacement PS2. These days, its controller one port tends to ignore my input and co-opt my commands with its own whims.
  
• 2005: Bought a Japanese launch PSP. A year later, its Square button stopped working correctly.
  
• 2006: Bought a launch PlayStation 3. It still works perfectly! I foresee this as a temporary state of affairs.
  
• 2007: Picked up a PSP-2000. Yeah.

Meanwhile, my Xbox 360 (which I've owned for four years) still works fine. And while I've had some issues with the (ridiculous number of) Nintendo DS systems I've owned, Nintendo was happy to repair them for quickly and for free, even once they were out of warranty. I suppose that's just what makes Sony special.

The worst part of it is, I'll be replacing my PSP sooner or later, because even though I'm sick of wasting money on Sony's shoddily-made hardware, there are just enough games on the way that I really, really want to play -- Persona 3, Parasite Eve: The 3rd Birthday, and all those Falcom games XSeed just licensed -- to make it worth my trouble. But first, I'm gonna wait around for E3 to see if maybe they announce a new PSP. Needless to say, I'm eagerly looking forward to their next generation of expensive crap that will eventually break down and force me to replace it out of pocket.

category: games | forums | 34 comments | §

Mission accomplished (two out of three)

05 June 10 | 12:03 | Posted by:

The week is already at an end! So let's tally up how it went.



I fulfilled my mission to post five Kit-Kat Densetsu entries this week, even if the last one was slightly later than intended. I think I am allowed some leeway on that one, though, because I was too busy trying not to puke after eating yesterday's subject to be able to write about it. Seriously, yuck. That's one!



I've mailed off all the GameSpite subscriber books destined for U.S. addresses over the past couple of days, and those should be arriving as soon as... well, probably yesterday, for California folks. The international books are in a bag by my feet, addressed and ready to be mailed when I venture forth for lunch in a little while. It feels pretty good to have those taken care of, even if they're a bit late, too. I'm already planning ahead to this fall's book and have a few solid ideas in mind. So, that's two.



But alas, three is where it falls apart. I was hoping to have GameSpite Year One, Vol. 2 ready to go up for sale Monday morning, thus fulfilling my self-imposed mandate to have a new book ready the first week of every third month. But, I am still proofing the text and haven't yet begun making the corrections in the InDesign file, so it looks like it will be another week before that's ready. Which means it will probably be completely lost in the noise of E3. That's a shame, because I'm really happy with how this book has turned out. It's huge, dense, and interesting to look at. Well, at least the tiny handful of people who notice it will enjoy it.

And now, back to Peace Walker and literally undressing teenage girls with my eyes saving Latin America.

category: blog | forums | seven comments | §

Walkin' peacefully

04 June 10 | 11:54 | Posted by:

So, I'm working on a review of Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker this weekend (sorry, Bob!). I've gotten over my disappointment that the game isn't a tie in with Nintendo's pedometer and Vitality Sensor that centers around going for quiet walks in the park and am willing to face Kojima's latest on its own terms. At the one-hour mark, I'm kind of impressed by some of the little details, at least; for example, Master Miller's English voice actor sounds a lot like Cam Clarke/Jimmy Flinders, which (in hindsight) helps to sell a plot twist in a 12-year-old game. Totally an unnecessary detail, but one that's appreciated.

Anyway, before I get too far into the story and risk crossing the threshold at which you have to assume anything I write is a spoiler, I'm going to make a prediction for this game's big plot twist. My theory: The game's uncomfortably underaged jailbait mascot character Paz -- her name isn't actually Spanish for "peace," it's short for "Pazuzu." In the end, she'll reveal that she's secretly a demon before devouring Big Boss's soul, turning him into a slave of evil and finally rationalizing his (retroactively) uncharacteristic turn as a cackling, mustache-twirling villain in the first two Metal Gear games.

This will also mean that the Monster Hunter connections and other product placement details present in the Japanese edition of the game have been replaced by a Futurama crossover.



Best game ever.

category: games | forums | 21 comments | §

GSQ4: The Mainstreaming of Mass Effect

03 June 10 | 09:46 | Posted by:

Mass Effect 2: The Mainstreaming of Mass Effect
As you may know, GameSpite Quarterly 4 featured a large section on the evolution and state of RPGs. This piece is the natural bookend to Jake's opener: A look at how RPGs might be finding their way again, possibly, by shaking up genre clichés. I'm pretty happy with how this one turned out, especially since it could have come off as a crotchety rant against genre evolution. Do please enjoy.

category: games, gamespite | forums | 23 comments | §

GSQ4: Lowly in WURM

01 June 10 | 21:54 | Posted by:

WURM Online: Lowly in WURM
The press proof for Year One, Vol. 2 has arrived and it is far more glorious than I could have hoped. Seriously, this book is rad. And that reminded me that three months ago we published another rad book and that I need to get back into the swing of posting its contents online! So here you go: A whimsical journey into the obscure. Please enjoy.

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

Turf wars, in space

01 June 10 | 15:29 | Posted by:

"ARROGANT PRIDE: Yeah, boy, we own this town. FURTIVE PANIC: Uh-oh, it's the five-oh. Cheese it."

(Actually, not really in space... in the Sunset district.)

category: games | forums | four comments | §