No Crisis Yet

Can't Abide

2012-01-18T13:30:00.000-05:00

SOPA shouldn't happen.

While I should spend at least 750-1000 words telling you why, time is not on my side today. So let's stick to the bullet points of my argument.

Firstly, Google, Reddit, Rock Paper Shotgun, and a host of other sites have either blacked out their content completely today or have featured some kind of prominent anti-SOPA announcement on their sites. While I'd never suggest to someone to blindly follow another's lead, when it comes to matters of the internet, I trust the people running these establishments.

Second, normal, everyday constituents weren't calling and mailing their representatives to tell them to pass this bill. I'd wager that not even the crusty old retirees that have nothing better to do than to follow state politics did, either. In all likelihood, this is the concerted effort of organizations like the MPAA and the RIAA (as well as numerous old-media oriented corporations they represent) to reclaim "lost profits" that they blame on copyright infringement. Just like the first World War, a bunch of old white people are trying to drag their constituents into a fight the common man or woman has absolutely no stake in. Again.

Finally, I'm a capitalist. I like living in a capitalist environment. I get paid to write, something that would be inconceivable in other parts of the world. But my income depends on the fact that I'm good at my job. So if I decided to just stop following current events and then write a factually bankrupt article, I wouldn't get paid. It's a good arrangement.

Now enter the record and movie industries. Media has shifted dramatically in the past ten years, and the landscape they used to dominate with impunity is now a frightening and scary place for them. CDs aren't selling so well, movies and TV shows are streamed digitally, and blockbuster video games are actively competing with big budget theatrical releases. Former media titans can't cope. But instead of changing their game up, they bought lobbyists and tried to hobble a legal threat to their dominance through legislation. In the words of so many conservative firebrands, they have become whiny, needy socialists that are trying to get the government to make their profits back for them.

No. I can't abide.

I'm a red-blooded American capitalist. I believe in the almighty dollar. As I've been told time and time again during Republican debates and in the Union Leader editorial section, if you can't hack it in this country, if you can't pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, then you deserve to starve.

Let these old, bloated, dying media giants starve.

Here are some relevant links to SOPA information and petitions, as well as a list of legislators who support the bill:

Google's SOPA Page
List of Companies Supporting SOPA
List of Legislators Supporting SOPA
Fark's SOPA Page

In 12 More Months

2011-12-31T13:21:00.002-05:00

Happy new year, gentle readers. Pictured above is one of my favorite gaming achievements of 2011; well, less an achievement and more of an experience. The good chap David Femia and I beat Golden Axe in an actual arcade (the very arcade I covered for Kotaku and NHPR, actually). And while it's definitely not on the level of Dark Souls or Nethack, it definitely had a good End of Year vibe to it.

Howll is Magnificent

2011-12-10T23:57:00.001-05:00

Hey! You! Evan Benoit (illustrator and master musician) and collaborator Kara Holbert made these pieces of music. Evan and I have kicked down dungeon doors and made much adventure. Their music makes me want to go off alone and bang out some kind of sad, poignant novel on a battered Smith Corona.

Listen now!

<p>&amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://howll.bandcamp.com/album/demo-ep"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Demo EP by Howll&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;gt;</p>

December, You Say?

2011-12-09T15:14:00.001-05:00

Somehow, the world's gone and marched into December without my knowing it. Now, Christmas music pours out of every storefront, my inbox is swamped with devilishly good promotions from Newegg, and Steam is seeking to make a dent in my wallet whenever it can- much to my girlfriend's disdain.

So what have I been up to?

First and foremost, I need to use this space to plug the hell out of Kill Screen #5: The Sound Issue. It was forged in blood and fire by the absolutely dedicated spirit of Chris Dahlen, who is a king among editors. Aside from being my first real print editor, Chris has poured his heart and soul into every issue of Kill Screen he's worked on, and it bums me out that he won't be heading another issue. That said, put down some money for this mag and read my article "Voices in the Dark." I delve into the underground YouTube culture of Let's Play, chasing after one NetHack player's voice I listened to for an entire summer. Harrowing stuff.

On the radio front, I put in three solid pieces of work for the amazingly produced NHPR show, Word of Mouth, in November. Online drug markets, video game trailers, and a Lego competition of the most brutal kind were all part of my production blitz. GO LISTEN IMMEDIATELY AND COMMENT. It would let my bosses know that you kind folks appreciate my hard work and whatnot.

You'll also note on that last link that I've done some real journalism, covering a ribbon cutting ceremony, the installation of Manchester's new bishop, and several other news bits. Slowly but surely I'm becoming a grown up.

As for the horizon? Not entirely sure. I'm looking at investigating some of New Hampshire's more aggressive PACs, as well as all this business with Manchester's immigrant population, and Ted Gatsas trying to cut their funding. Wait and see, dear readers, wait and see.

An Historic Theft

2011-11-21T16:35:00.001-05:00

At almost 25 years old, writing a whiny internet post about having your skateboard stolen is the equivalent of calling your mom long distance and crying about having to eat vegetables. Or maybe complaining to your significant other about how college homework is a drag and there should be more time for recess. After a certain age, you’re just not supposed to do certain things anymore. For this cosmos-shattering event, however, I will make an exception.

To the Thieves Who Stole My Skateboard,

I shouldn’t care that you took my 4:3 aspect ratio TomTom. It was a solid electronic, I’ll give you that, but it was no Garmin. And honestly, I’m rocking a GPS on my phone, so it stings a little less. Nonetheless, that crappy TomTom and I have been on all kinds of mundane adventures together. It was a Christmas gift from my parents. Sure, the maps were out of date the first time I booted it up, and it couldn’t hold a charge for longer than half-hour. But it was mine.

Additionally, you swiped a bunch of wires for a cigarette phone charger gifted to me by a friend. But you dolts left actual charger behind, only snatching the various attachments that are nigh useless without the USB part. What could you possibly do with those, besides discard them in the gutter two or three blocks from my apartment once you realized your error- if you realized it at all.

And, thieves, I can only speculate what were you thinking when you slashed open the bag full of old clothes headed for Salvation Army. What riches would I possibly keep in lumpy Market Basket bags in the back seat? Maybe in some parallel universe, wherein Mirror-World Jon Lynch kept stacks of laundered money in his 2011 base level Civic VP, would there be anything you’d want. But not here, not in this world.

There was probably little, if anything at all, for you in that car. I rarely leave anything important in my car, save for one thing.

You dicks stole my skateboard.

The black and bright pink Zero deck was worn down to nothing. Its pale green Tensor trucks were ground down to the metal, and those concrete-bitten Spitfire wheels barely turned. You damn well better believe I loved every inch of that board. I can’t count how many long hours I spent on that tired collection of hardware, pivoting, grinding, and lazily riding around. While I’m hesitant to say any one material thing could define a man, that weathered, creaky board easily had more than a bit of my soul in it.

And now it’s probably snapped in half, ditched in some ungrateful punk’s backyard. Or maybe collecting dust in a pawn shop, probably sold for less than the amount needed for any meaningful amount of drugs.

You uncivilized wretches. You dogs. Vermin.

It’s one thing when your mark is a big box retail store or some kind of corporation that deals in billions of dollars annually; entirely another when you prey on your fellow, penniless man.

Literarily spitting in your faces,
Jon Lynch

Aftermath

2011-10-20T16:57:00.001-04:00

By the time I got to Veteran's Park, any outward signs of the Occupy NH camp had vanished. All that was left was a pile of bright yellow tent stakes and remnants of the protesters' signs packed into city trash bins throughout the park. The light drizzle and gray clouds hanging over Manchester compounded the gloomy scene.I was at the park to report live from the scene for NHPR's The Exchange. But all I had to describe was a wet, empty park, with a solitary protester holding a sign near the entrance. Here's the tape from this morning:

At the entrance to the park, face down in a puddle, was a sign I had taken a picture of last Saturday.

And one lone protester stood on the Elm Street side of the park, clutching a 99% sign. He was adamant that Occupy activists would be returning to the park this weekend to continue the demonstration.

Rally Cars Go Fast

2011-08-05T14:02:00.001-04:00

This post was supposed to be more substantive update, but this video is hard and fast and still awesome, so to hell with it. Here's me riding with rally racer Chris Duplessis as he tears the hell out of the shakedown course at the 2011 New England Forest Rally. I was covering it for Word of Mouth, of course.

Space and Race

2011-07-16T20:01:00.004-04:00

June doesn't exist as far as my blog's timeline is concerned, which is good and bad in equal measures. Bad, because typing words into Blogger's gaping maw and posting some relevant links and pictures is easy and I was lazy last month. Good, because I moved to Manchester and produced a bunch of awesome things.

Early in June, I covered the International Video Game Tournament for Edge. It was, by far, the most difficult thing I've had to write about, only because there was just so much to condense into 2500 words. Still, I'm happy with the way the piece turned out. You can pick up a digital copy of the magazine here, if it suits your fancy, or wait until it makes its way to the US next month.

On the radio front, I wrote a script for Word of Mouth about the end of NASA's shuttle program and what it means for manned space travel. Being interviewed is the ever-informative Clara Moskowitz, a veteran science and tech reporter for space.com. While not the most in-depth piece, it's worth a listen if you're interested in interstellar travel and meteors that shoot ice.

Finally, I just got back from covering the New England Forest Rally a few hours ago. In what has to be a bizarre phenomenon, I have amazing tape combined with a script I wrote in a quaint little coffee shop in Bethel, Maine. Expect to see this riveting rally piece air soonish.

In the mean time, I'm going to relax for a bit, catch up on some Dead Space 2, and practice some more word smithing.

Hookahs and Caterpillars

2011-05-25T15:35:00.005-04:00

Whether you're a tobacco enthusiast or a rampant health freak, you should give a listen to a piece I produced on hookah use for Word of Mouth. I go to a hookah bar and chat up the friendly bartender, Dr. Tom Eissenberg discusses the health ramifications of hookah use, and the piece closes with Jefferson Airplane's White Rabbit. Radio at is finest.

[Story's launch page]

[Direct download]

End in Sight

2011-05-15T16:39:00.003-04:00

Have you heard of Kill Screen Magazine? No? Well now you'll probably want to take a look, because the fine blokes over there recently ran a written version of my radio story about Fred Schofield, the finely aged New Englander that traffics in countless used games.

KS focuses on the more insightful aspects of gaming, the dark matter found between mindless top ten lists and Metacritic scores. They're a good bunch of fellows over there, so give them some internet traffic and shower them with Reddit upvotes and retweets.

On an even happier note, tomorrow marks the end of all known schoolwork. I will celebrate by beginning all known writing work.

Old Traders and Suicide

2011-04-22T14:53:00.000-04:00

Ever onwards. End-of-semester projects are grinding me into a fine dust, I'm in the midst of escaping my place of residence, and radio, that golden medium, is fast becoming my outlet of choice.

This week I interviewed a salty game trader about his insanely huge collection of used games and systems (see: two full-sized shipping containers brimming with N64 carts). Also, Jason Johnson, of Kill Screen fame, was on the show, talking about suicide in Japan, and how some games are trying to save lives.

Give'em a listen.

Twenty-Three Stab Wounds

2011-03-31T16:08:00.003-04:00

Earlier this week, I interviewed Sebastian Lockwood about his surreal performance piece, Paint Caesar Dead, for New Hampshire Public Radio. It's a bloody affair that combines spoken word with traditional art created over the course of the hour. Go yonder and give it a listen:

[Et Tu, Art Student? - NHPR]

As Observed in the Wild

2011-03-28T12:41:00.003-04:00

Diablo II communities of any type are not known to be bastions of intellectual discourse, but as a new ladder season dawns, the natives of D2JSP are especially restless.

Space Complications

2011-03-21T21:16:00.002-04:00

Look what came in the mail today: a copy of X3: Reunion 2.0, an incredibly complicated space-trade-sim to sate the Freelancer hunger that's overtaken me. Sure, I've checked out and installed the excellent Discovery mod, but I felt that I needed something that would scare the hell out of me and bully me with all sorts complex icons and controls. X3 seems to be up to the task.

Not that I'll get to enjoy it any time soon.

Mid-terms, freelance work, and a hefty sleep deficit all seek to rob me of my precious free time. For now, I'll just watch the below tutorial video in sleepy stupor.

Notch's Portfolio

2011-03-17T20:44:00.007-04:00

Minecraft deity Notch has posted up a number of screenshots from his uncompleted games portfolio. Some resemble roguelike RPGs while others ape Wizardry-style dungeon crawls. There's even a Mega Man style prototype in the photo dump. Go take a look at Minecraft's obscure relatives and gaze in wonder at how far Notch has come as a developer.

Optical Obscurity

2011-03-04T15:55:00.001-05:00

I had a horrible urge to load up the Windows 3.1 version of Sid Meir's Colonization this week. This required me to rummage around in my drawer-o-CDs; a deathly cramped pit of awful disc-case art and an unholy amount of wasted hours of my adolescence. Hell, some of the games in that drawer would've never found their way to retail distribution these days. But for the sake of proving my old school gamer badassitude, let's meander down memory lane.

Up there with Windows ME, Asheron's Call 2 was one of the biggest software disasters with Microsoft's name on it. I was a no-doubt useless beta tester for the game, but never picked it up in retail form. In fact, I think I traded my Everquest account and discs for this game. MMO haggling at its finest.

Fond memories abound in Mob Rule, mostly of the awful pre-rendered movies featured in-game. Apparently, it's the bastard child of a British made game called Builder, which was far, far superior to this ragged mafia simulator. But when a flashy big box game stares up at you longingly from the bargain bin at Electronic Boutique, who are you to not take it home?

Good god, couldn't I have found a Sid Meir's transportation management sim instead of this German made horror? I poured hour upon hour into this business management sim. Godless AI would wreck house, price gouge your eyes, and weave idiotically designed transportation networks around the best factories and resources on the map. But I persevered, and even had a company that turned a profit. Once.

While not my introduction to the Police Quest series, SWAT 2 was my jumping off point into RTS games that didn't require resource management and base building. Which is good, because I didn't have to waste time building up my forces only for them to be shot to death while commanding a terrorist to put his weapon down. A game that focused on the procedure of policing more than the gunplay, SWAT 2 can be credited with ruining every movie with a SWAT team in it for me forever after. Also it features a level where you play terrorists taking over a college. Hm.

The fact that this game was published by Simon and Schuster probably should've tipped me off to its quality, but I was sixteen and crazy on sex hormones and it was right there on a Big Lots bargain shelf. This was a squad-based strategy game set in (gasp) a post-apocalyptic Russia. Units had persistent inventories and skills, and it was pretty compelling- until you saw said units' deficit path-finding skills in action. I never personally beat it, but according to its Wikipedia page, one of the game's endings has your units "transported away and transformed into hideous Death Knights." So I guess that's kind of gnarly.

On the Air

2011-02-27T14:01:00.000-05:00

A little while back, I wrote a piece on a newly opened arcade in Pelham, New Hampshire. The story has since been picked up by New Hampshire Public Radio, and was turned into a neat little piece that can be found here. Give it a listen and bask in the geek-riddled noise that is my voice.

For the Love of the Game

2011-02-22T19:42:00.020-05:00

The golden age of the American arcade has long since passed, its torch taken up by modern consoles, iPod apps, and Facebook games. But walking down the aisles of vintage game cabinets in the American Classic Arcade Museum, you would never know it. People young and old dart from machine to machine, clutching plastic cups brimming with tokens, while Eurythmics’ “Sweet Dreams” is piped in via overhead speakers. As far as the museum is concerned, the great arcade crash of the 1980s never happened. However, this sanctuary for retro gaming might be in danger.

“The whole American Arcade Museum is a labor of love,” says Gary Vincent, president of the museum. When asked why he bothers restoring and maintaining the nearly 300 vintage arcade cabinets, Gary doesn’t hesitate to respond: “They’re part of American history. Look at the popularity of video games today. Where did it all start? With games like Space Invaders and Pac-Man.”

A veteran of the arcade business, Gary describes his introduction to the classic gaming world as little more than a temporary job: “I started at Funspot in August of ‘81. It was going to be a three to four week, end of the summer fill in job. I had a blast, so I came back the next summer.” Thirty years later, Gary now helps operate one of the most revered arcade museums in the United States.

Founded in 1998, the museum's goal was to maintain and restore classic arcade games while still making them available to the public. Its notoriety rose sharply upon the release of The King of Kong, a documentary highlighting the Donkey Kong high score rivalry between Steve Weibe and Billy Mitchell. The museum is also well known for its annual International Classic Video Game Tournament in which gamers the world over come to compete for high scores and set world records. However renown alone can't pay the upkeep for the massive games collection.

A non-profit organization, the ACAM doesn’t make money from its tournaments or coin-op machines. “The only steady source of funding we have right now,” admits Gary, “is the bingo game we run on Thursday nights. It’s getting to the point where it’s expensive maintain the collection.” Many of the machines on the floor of the museum are built piecemeal from salvaged parts. Someone might donate an empty cabinet, a control overlay, or a marquee. Gary and other volunteers reconstruct the games from these parts, sometimes over the course of years. All of this costs the museum time and money.

Because nearly every game is available for public play, Gary must also contend with the collection’s ongoing maintenance. With decades old titles, every day presents the museum’s staff with a new stuck button, flickering screen, or jammed coin slot. It’s a rare day when every machine on the floor is fully functional. Yet it’s this element of interactivity that creates the museum's authentic arcade experience.

This January the ACAM kicked off a fundraiser with a goal of $25,000. As of this writing, $2,000 has been raised - around 7% of its stated goal. Gary points out that the proceeds are already making a difference: “We’ve been able to buy parts for the games with the money we’ve raised. There are still a lot of projects we want to tackle.”

While some might dispute the relevance of an arcade museum in 2011, Vincent says the institution has found new life in modern gaming culture: “Last year, the guys from PAX East contacted us and asked us bring down some games. I thought we were going to be oddballs of the convention, bringing out these old dinosaurs for people to play. We opened our room up and within ten minutes it was filled, shoulder to shoulder. It was crazy.”

The museum is slated to return to PAX East this year, and will continue to host its yearly tournament this summer. But as each machine in the collection gets older and the parts needed to repair them become rarer, it's plain to see the museum will need additional proceeds to sustain itself. With the fundraiser ending March 15th, it looks doubtful that the museum will meet its goal. Gary Vincent remains optimistic: “I think we’re preserving a lot of people’s childhood memories, and a part of gaming's heritage here. I think people will see the value in keeping this part of history alive.”

The American Classic Arcade Museum is located in Weirs Beach, New Hampshire.
Photos courtesy of Amanda Lynch.

2011-02-16T16:48:00.000-05:00

Do you like video games? Do you like silly rap beats? Or Dungeons and Dragons? Then you might enjoy B Dolan's "Vin Diesel." Give it a chance. If you don't appreciate the lyrical mastery within, then at least admire the confidence it takes to declare your level 10 friendship with Vin Diesel.
Via Dave Femia.

What's on the Radar

2011-02-15T19:09:00.001-05:00

Down to brass tacks, gentle internet plebians. First and foremost, I hope you notice the snazzy new blog header and bookmark icon. It's class all the way here at NCY. Hopefully the white background won't cause you snow blindness, but I refuse to promise a damn thing to you.

Second, what's up with said classiness improvements? Welp, capital-T Things are happening behind the scenes. Just picture massive clockwork mechanisms clicking and whirring impressively, working tirelessly to some unknown end. These Things are tentative enough where I don't want to directly address them in this post and prematurely spoil EVERYTHING. Suffice to say that I'll be putting up content here and elsewhere more often. Which is a good thing.

Thirdly, I'm buried in coursework once again, but I'm in a stellar American-Jewish fiction class. And one of the books we're reading has a hundred-page digression where the protagonist trains an eagle to fight other eagles and snakes. Again, FIGHT other EAGLES and SNAKES. Awesome.

But what can I pimp to you in the mean time? Well, fellow gamer/adventurer David Femia and I attended a Super Street Fighter IV tournament in Cambridge a few weekends back, which will be captured in a piece that I am currently grooming to perfection (see: violently procrastinating). Over winter break I tried my hand and failed at abstracting the roguelike genre in RPG Maker. And when I haven't been eight-feet deep in reading for class, I've been abusing myself in Two Worlds II, which I'll describe in vast, gory detail for you soonish.

So stay tuned, keep peeking in at this deserted wasteland of content. Change is a'coming.

AI Wars

2011-01-20T21:24:00.002-05:00

Growing up, I was terrified of the default Starcraft AI. Like a coward, I would frequent 5v3 comp-stomps on Bnet and thrash the computers from a basely safely sandwiched between two allies. But when I got to college and Starcraft became the LAN game of choice, the AI became a joke. Harassing their mineral line a minute into the game with a lone worker resulted in comically bad behavior on the computer's part. The illusion was dispelled; we weren't matching wits with some wily, cunning entity. We were dumbly bashing our heads against a set of scripted reactions.

But the cream of the crop of custom-written Starcraft AI? Not so susceptible to that game-opening gambit. No, this AI is mean, merciless even. And it fought other AI's tooth and nail for its title as Most Brutal Starcraft Bot in Existence. It's able to micro-manage mutalisks like a bad mother, strategically use overlords to maximize its combat awareness, and maneuver its units around the map according to the perceived threat of enemy units.

Meet the Berkeley Overmind.

Created for an artificial intelligence competition, the Overmind had become the new posterchild for legitimate applications of game environments. Also, it's a bit scary to see some computer harass and humiliate an ex-Starcraft pro.

Go, read the relatively dry write up about the Overmind and enrich yourself.

Arcade Magic

2011-01-16T11:25:00.004-05:00

Tucked in the corner unit of a shopping plaza in sleepy Pelham, New Hampshire, the Pinball Wizard Arcade gives few clues to its existence aside from its crisp looking billboard. But head through the doors, past the front counter, and down the arcade's aisles of vintage games and a single fact becomes overwhelmingly apparent: this very well might be the next great stronghold of classic gaming in New England.

"What was the first thing you noticed when you walked through the doors?" asks Sarah St. John, owner of the Wizard. I tell her that I was impressed by the condition of her machines. “That’s right,” she says, “this is something I take seriously.” Standing two inches taller than me and sporting a firm handshake, St. John is not the type you’d imagine running an arcade. But as we weave between classic Williams cabinets and pinball machines, St. John listing stats and dates for each game, you get the sense that this woman is less an arcade owner and more a veteran curator in a buzzing, flashing, neon-lit museum.

St. John has owned and maintained pinball machines since high school. “It’s my passion,” she says. A member of the Boston Pinball Association, St. John describes herself as “a gamer, period. I’m die-hard pinball fan, I’ll do anything to play.” But her collection isn’t limited to pinball cabinets.

Coming upon two machines, St. John turns to me and says “Did you see the Fighter? The Mark Whalburg movie?” I told her I had. “Do you remember the scene in the bar, with the two arcade cabinets in the background?” I didn’t. “These are them. Crystal Castles and Joust. They were in that movie.” And for the first time during the interview, something creeps into the even, measured tone of St. John’s voice. I realize it’s unabashed pride at these machines.

They are, without a doubt, the most impeccably restored machines I’ve seen in person. You’ll be hard pressed to find a burned-in screen or a sagging, wobbly joystick on the premises. This quality extends not just to the older pinball games, but right up to cabinets from the mid-90s and onwards. Even more astounding is the fact that they’re all available for public play. When I ask her if she’s concerned about having her cabinets (of which a substantial amount are from her own collection) out on the floor, St. John doesn’t bat an eye. “It’s what they’re made for.”

It would be one thing if St. John was running a museum. But what she has planned for the Wizard is something else entirely. She points to two large LCD screens on either side of the arcade floor. “You’ll be able to see the high scores for games locally and nationally on those TVs,” she tells me. The games will be connected to a database of high-scores via an online service, allowing players at the Wizard to log their scores in real time. I ask her if she aims to bring back competitive gaming to the arcade scene. “Absolutely. I’m hoping to keep the hobby alive.”

Currently, there are plans for monthly tournaments, alternating between classic and modern games each month. With nearly three-hundred cabinets over 9800-square-feet, the possibilities for home-brewed competition over high scores and bragging rights are endless.

Similarly impressive is the selection of games, new and old alike. From the double playfield-using Banzai Run to the 1977 Superman, old-school gamers looking to log some time at their favorite machines have a good chance of finding them here. Black Knight, Gorgar, Sorcerer- eighties pulp fantasy art drips off these games. Fighting game aficionados need not feel left out, though. SNK vs. Capcom, StreetFighter Alpha, and other fighting game staples get their own row of freshly restored cabinets.

Beyond its varied, well maintained collection, the Wizard further differentiates itself from its peers through the technical expertise of its staff. St. John takes me into the back room, a 3000-square-foot workshop brimming with classic game parts. Extracted monitors sit in a well-ordered grid on the floor. A folding table is covered in tools. Cabinets are in various stages of restoration. “If there’s a problem with any of the machines out there,” says St. John, “I’m here, I’m on the floor.” Her calloused hands speak to her time spent in the guts of these machines.

I let Sarah get back to work and make my way around the dimly lit arcade for a final round of note taking. Walking past the rows of beeping, flashing electronic spectacles, it’s hard not to feel that you’re in the presence of vast work of love. You see it in the mint condition of the Super Sprint steering wheels and the spotless glass on the Galaga machine; in the responsiveness of the StreetFighter II joysticks and the new gloss on the control knobs for Ice Cold Beer. St. John and her team have assembled this place with a reverence and attention to detail you’d be hard pressed to find outside of private arcade collections.

The effort hasn’t gone unnoticed. Despite the fact that the arcade had its grand opening the day before, during a blizzard, classic gamers from all over New England were in attendance. “We had a huge turn out,” said St. John during my tour. Even as I was talking to her, a number of other middle-aged gamers were asking her about the machines, the collection, and what other games were being restored. While St. John is adamant that her arcade is perfect for date nights and family outings, it’s not hard to see the Wizard accumulating its own following of dedicated regulars.

Heading towards towards the doors, I take one last look at the newly opened arcade. Down the row of pinball machines closest to the exit, I spot Sarah St. John elbow deep in the Black Knight pinball machine. She patiently tugs at and examines wires, looking back up at the scoreboard every now and then. Besides her is a cart heaped with tools. Captured in the scene is the essence of the arcade itself: a sincere love of gaming and respect for the classic machines that shaped most of our childhoods in one form or another.

The Pinball Wizard is located in Pelham, NH on Route 38. Their website is www.pinballwizardarcade.com.

Flickr album of my visit

Photos by Amanda Lynch

The Lost World (of Optimization)

2011-01-11T01:43:00.000-05:00

Look, this isn't for everyone, but hear me out: if you like clever sound Brits discussing the ups and downs of pre-pixel shading rendering methods and clever optimizations, give this Let's Play series a look. This man picks apart Trespasser from both a gameplay and technology standpoint. He proclaims himself as a game programmer, and I'm inclined to believe him, judging from the technical commentary.

Give it a watch, learn some things about old-school graphics rendering and fledgling physics engines.

Review: Cosplay Crisis

2011-01-07T02:36:00.006-05:00

There wasn't a lot of incentive to head back into the horrid depths of RPG Maker communities after reviewing Vibrant Story. But where I'm on break and work has been slow lately, I decided to inflict upon myself more jRPG/cosplay/furry inspired awfulness. Especially when two of those things have been joined in an unholy reunion. That's right.

Ever wondered what would happen if, like, the characters from Final Fantasy VII and Final Fantasy VIII met? Like, they totally crossed over or something? And there was cosplay? And the introduction to Final Fantasy VII was translated into a shitty 2D, overhead RPG? Me neither, but thank the internet gods for committed Squaresoft fans like SorceressKyrsty. Let's let her describe the game in her own words:

A crossover FF7/8/9+RE RPG game with an intricate (and slightly whacked) storyline, mingames, multiple character animations and locations to explore, Cosplay Crisis will redefine your view on crossover fangames.
Since this isn't some half-assed attempt full of (shitty) rips and 235mb of inappropriate music.
(It's full of 235mb of inappropriate animations P:)

Reading the game's description, I knew I was on the threshold of greatness. Finally, I thought to myself, a game that would change how I think about fan-made crossover games. Deliverance at last from the searing hatred that swells in my heart when I see "Final" or "Fantasy" in an RPG maker title. As the game's download progress inched towards completion, I excitedly looked through the game's promotional screenshots when BLAM:

OH FUCKING YES

Originally a one megabyte png file, I had to pare this divine work of art down to jpeg format that I might fit its awesomeness on to my meager blog. I'm no art critic, mind you, but let's try to break down the action in the above slice of godliness.

Firstly, you've got a full moon. Little known anime fact: if there's a full moon in the background of an image, a fight must break out in the foreground. This is science. Now at first flush, looks like we've got a standard Cloud versus Vincent fight going on, right? Wrong. You idiot. That's not Cloud, but a Cloud-Sephiroth hybrid. To top it off, Sephicloud's wielding not one, but TWO swords. Because dual wielding things is cool and not at all impractical or stupid looking in reality.

So even before I've started actually playing Cosplay Crisis, I'm ~~apprehensive~~ stoked. Sephicloud is fighting Vincent, this game has a "slightly whacked" storyline, and I was explicitly promised multiple character animations. Things are looking pret-ty keen. Then I launched the game and tried to select some bitchin FF music.

Look, I'm not a picky gamer. But when I can't even properly select what kind of stolen Final Fantasy music my game is going to blast at me in midi format, I can't help but feel insulted. It's like SorceressKyrsty saw this and was like "Whatever, they'll figure out what I wanted the cursor to be over." Such a blatant show of laziness thirty-three seconds into the game, while impressive in its not-giving-a-shit-ness about the user, is sloppy. Still, I might be nitpicking.

So the game kicks off with...the opening of Final Fantasy VII. Only with a lot of tongue-in-cheek jokes and self-references. It's all so wonderfully meta! Just look at Kumo and Levi's dialog.

This screams "Auteur"

Oh cool. It's like the characters are self-aware that they're reenacting the opening of a Final Fantasy game. I get it. Well, now that the game designer has given us a wink and nod, she won't make us suffer through the opening, right? She'll do something wholly original and take this game intro right off its tracks into new territory!

Get it? "Off the tracks?" GET IT?

Wow, nope. There's Barret and Tifa knockoffs. And unsuspecting train guards. Only the train's scale is way, way off. It looks like Barret's head would barely clear the window on the train's doors. This whole scene looks like the tragic aftermath of a rumble between child cosplayers on a train platform. Well, hopefully the combat will be interesting and not at all badly animated.

No. No it's not.

To be fair, SorceressKyrsty directly responds to someone criticizing her game's similarity to Final Fantasy VII. She says, of its perceived sameness:

That isn't the actual intro, by the way. This game features numerous scenes from the games adopted into the storyline of this one for nostalgia's sake. The original never had anything like this at all, especially since I was less familiar with FF7 back then.

The simularities with the intro and FF7's intro is not only because of nostalgia; the demo of Final Fantasy VIII was of their exam/ mercenary mission (I used the music intentionally here) and if I'm not mistaken the demo of Final Fantasy VII was the Reactor mission, too.

Ahh, so I was supposed to pick up on the audio cue used from another game in the Final Fantasy series to understand that this recreated section of another game in the series was used only for demonstration purposes. And that this is all being done for nostalgia. Got it. On that note, here's some concept art with Clou- I MEAN Kumo suggestively reaching into his pocket.

He spotted me...but he's not stopping.

In short, the game demo took a little under nine minutes to complete. That's reading all of the butchered dialog and tweaking my inventory. There's random encounters, a horrendously scripted boss battle, and an ambiguous ending which I thought was a glitch. (After the screen fades to black after the boss battle, the game asks you to save. Then music strikes up but nothing ever happens. This was apparently intended.)

Just as I did with Tomas C. Morrow's work (of Thomas C. Morrow fame), I feel a little twinge writing blunt words about a teenager's pet project. Of course Cosplay Crisis was going to suck as a game. Of course there's a blog filled with awful image after awful image of Cloud and Squall and Clousqualliroth. Of course one of the game's users doesn't know what "decompress" means, or how to install font files.

But when it comes down to it, this project is out there for all to see, experience, and rate. One could argue that the entire RMN site is dedicated to giving as much exposure to these projects as possible. And if I'm not there to inject reality into these people's lives with the jagged, rusty syringe of honest commentary, who will?

Certainly not boobledeebo.

Or EOCDRAGON.

No, if I don't burst the bubble around these cursed products of gaming culture, this horrid insulation will remain in place, and these games will continue to sprout up like so many jRPG weeds, and the bar for what makes a good game will be tossed aside, like so many overweight cosplayers' pants after Comicon. It cannot be allowed to pass.

Download and play this atrocity.

Time-sink-Craft

2011-01-06T19:26:00.000-05:00

So my friend has graciously been hosting a Minecraft server for us to dick around in. Several days in and there have been some interesting developments. I roughed out a pretty snazzy art-deco style building, Chris went mad and burned down half the whole goddamn server with precarious lava placement, and Jesse built a clubhouse in the sky, complete with water slide down.

The Bravest Man

2011-01-05T06:54:00.001-05:00

First things first: You will never be as brave as this Nethack player. You just won't. In 150 parts, he tackles - and wins - Nethack, a brutal roguelike from a time far removed from our own in terms of game design, player accessibility, and fairness.

Braver still is the fact that this guy sounds EXACTLY like Billy, from the Venture Brothers. See what I mean?

My absolute favorite bits of commentary:

"LET'S. PLAY. NETHACK! *click*"

"Ooh a lichen corpse!"

"Now, again, I'm dismounting to let it kill the hobbit."

"Please allow me to have a wand of wishing, o' great random number god."

I'm on video fifteen and I cannot wait to finish.

Olde Time Musings

2011-01-04T08:52:00.000-05:00

There's been a distinct, nerdy memory floating around in my mind for a long time. It's purely sentimental, but its content proves to be a deep look at the foundation of my fascination with gaming, as well as the overlapping areas of interest that intersect with gaming.

I was in a Walden Software a long, long time ago. I couldn't have been older than seven or eight. In the store's front window is a huge cardboard cutout display for the first Warcraft. Dark Forces boxes have their own shelves on a wall. Two heavyset geeks are discussing whether or not Imperial Stormtroopers are all clones or not.

And that's it. That's the memory. It's stood out in my mind for a long time, my brain choosing not to purge it for whatever reasons. The Warcraft display is still distinct in my mind, though I'm not sure if it was for the first game or the Tides of Darkness expansion for the second one. The dialog between the two nerds makes me smile. Firstly because I'm proud my brain has the ability to save the gist of conversations from a virtual millennium ago, and second, because I pondered the hell out of that clone possibility as a child. Bear in mind that Star Wars, at the time, existed as this ill-defined cluster of images I had once partially seen at my friend Tim's house.

I also have the distinct memory of excitedly checking with an Electronics Boutique about whether or not they had Creatures 2 in stock, but that's another, wholly more pathetic story.

No Rest for the Addicted

2010-12-27T01:56:00.003-05:00

Came across an interesting read today on BBC discussing what jobs generally don't call it quits during the holidays. The Warcraft thumbnail piqued my interest. I figured for sure they'd profile one of the in-game GMs or something, but no. I was wrong.

Instead, the article describes the account of one casual guild leader, who says the holidays are prime raiding time for adults with full-time careers.

"Being strictly an over 18 guild a lot of our members will have full time jobs and don't live with their parents, and as a result getting large groups together to raid is usually tricky, what with Christmas parties, Christmas shopping and visiting relatives," he said.

Credit where credit is due, BBC. This has been the most honest, based-in-reality article about video games I've yet gleaned from your British pages.

The Power of Love

2010-12-23T06:29:00.003-05:00

Aside from a few, scant flirtations with the resurrected Sam and Max series, I have no great love of Telltale games. Their take on Monkey Island for me ranged from "Meh" to "Mehh." Yet there's something about hearing the licensed stylings of Huey Lewis juxtaposed with a creepily wide-eyed likeness of Michael Fox that just hits me the right way.

Goblin Cannibal Massacre

2010-12-21T15:37:00.002-05:00

WoW's writers deserve more praise

Off the Wagon

2010-12-11T16:27:00.001-05:00

In mulling over this fine read at Eurogamer, a few thoughts emerged from the blackness that is Warcraft related discussion. First, if there were ever any doubts, the game itself is still a colossal, ever-regenerating entity that cannot be assailed by weakly designed clones. The article refers to it as a "evergreen game," a title not focused on getting players to buy the next game in the series, but one that must keep itself perpetually young and attractive. Described in this manner, WoW appears as a kind of unholy abomination, not content until every last moderately interested subscriber has broken down and resubscribed over the course of half a decade (me).

Second, just in reading the above article and getting the sense that droves of ex-players are signing up for the holidays to see what Cataclysm is all about, I want back in. Time and time again I've written about how Warcraft is more or less an utter waste of time. There's nothing valuable to be learned. You end up strongarmed into awkward social structures in order to get the best loot. Endgame burn-out will eventually claim your very soul. But even with the bald, grim truth staring me in the face, I want in.

Blame it on the fact that my WoW habit began in December, 2004. In the same way that birds instinctively know to migrate south when their biological clocks tell them to, a little part of my brain squirms and prods me during the holidays. It's horrible and inevitable and extremely compelling. Running around Ironforge in a bewildered, nerdtastic haze while A Christmas Story looped endlessly in the background is (arguably sadly) a warm memory. Reading the inevitable gift-related trash talk in trade chat while mulling around in Orgrimmar on Christmas morning, seeing all the Winter Veil decorations around the world- really, it defies rational explanation. I'm just remotely manipulating bits on a remote server in Irvine, California. Blame it on my weak human sentimentality.

So yes, I'll most likely be returning to Azeroth before the year is out. Just a month or two, surely. And just in admitting that, Blizzard has succeeded in tearing me off the wagon. And sure, Cataclysm is impressive as all hell across a number of spectrums, but to quote that Eurogamer article: "For the players, of course, this isn't important. They have new lands to explore, new races to play and a changed world to adventure through. For the next few weeks or months, their social lives (and those of their friends, I fear) may be somewhat diminished as a result."

I am doomed.

Hoo Boy

2010-12-10T15:28:00.001-05:00

On the one hand, I have to admire the fearless portrayal of the implements a regime used to try and wipe out an entire people. On the other, did the developer really have to use the original Doom engine for that portrayal?

My +1 Amulet of Disappointment

2010-12-06T02:19:00.003-05:00

Life was a brighter, less infuriating place before committing to trying to beat Neverwinter Nights' original campaign. When I'd sit down at my computer for a few hours of escapism before this commitment, I was optimistic, hopeful that I'd play something that would deliver me from my boring, earthly existence. Now, I sit down and stare at the Neverwinter Nights' shortcut with all the love a sweatshop worker has for his industrial sewing machine.

Simply put, Neverwinter Nights is wearing down my very soul.

My revulsion stems from many complaints, some fair, some not. Graphics are an unfair area. Trapped in all its antique glory, the game holds you captive in 2002. Characters' hands are comically blocky, and studded leather armor inexplicably makes my character appear with an ass-skirt. Textures are grimy, the water looks like something out of the original Half-Life, and animations are stilted and mechanical. Inventory icons are weirdly cartoony, telegraphing a sense that they lack any sort of importance.

On the writing front, I feel less badly calling Neverwinter Nights' campaign some of the shlockiest, contrived fantasy drivel ever to grace my monitor. Case in point, the first chapter. For the uninitiated, here's the skinny: the city of Neverwinter has been overtaken by a plague. A cure was in the works, but the four magical creatures from which the cure was to be derived have escaped into (gasp) the city's four districts. It's up to you(!) to get them back. Yes, the story roars to a start with...a series of fetch quests.

But worse than the structure of the plot are the key NPCs you come across. Aribeth is an overly sincere paladin who loves another bumbling, effeminate paladin named Fenthick. In turn, Fenthick is obsessed with a crabby old priest named Desther, who does nothing but bitch and complain about everything and constantly disparage your character. Not in a creative way, but in a "Hmm, this guy is trying to blatantly hinder all my efforts to find the root of the plague, hope he doesn't turn out to be evil" kind of way. Jokes on you if you thought he was a red herring, because he totally turns out to be evil. Not just evil, but stereotypically fantasy evil. He says shit like this like he's the first guy to ever demean a hero:

Uh-huh, doomed, childish, got it. *Yawn*

The writing, at least to the point I'm at the in the game, hasn't improved. Sure, Aribeth has the whole "tortured heroine" thing going on, and there are some choice bright spots (Grimgnaw, a lawful evil monk obsessed with death, springs to mind), but the game never transcends its sword and sorcery trappings.

Then there's combat. An admirer of thievery in all its forms, I chose to play as a rogue with a penchant for archery. With Grimgnaw doing all the upfront fighting, I figured I would stay on the edge of battles, bitchily firing arrows from the shadows. Instead, most important battles go like this: Grimgnaw gets in a few punches and kicks on harder enemies before being being butchered. I fire an arrow or two at the beasty before I lamely invoke my Stone of Recall - an item that miraculously teleports you out of the fray to a temple. There, the recently deceased Grimgnaw waits to be claimed, not unlike like a lost child. Grabbing my wayward monk, I run through the return portal, which beams me back into the action.

Shutup and get your ass through the portal to die for me

I've repeated this fight-teleport-fight cycle more times than I'm comfortable admitting. Bioware tried to curb this kind of exploitation by charging you per return trip, but you make enough gold to render this restriction useless. I justify the trick by telling myself I'm working with what Bioware gave me: absurdly imbalanced encounters and a stupidly effective panic button.

My gripes go on. Loot is handed out so frequently and so illogically you'll cease to care about it. I can't count the times I carefully disarmed and unlocked burly, trapped chests only to find nine gold pieces hidden within. Or a bottle of wine, or a scroll of Summon Monster I, or something similarly useless.

You can't change your henchmens' equipment, leading to situations where they're severely under-geared for tough encounters. Sure, you might have the perfect belt for Grimgnaw to wear so he stops getting torn apart by magic missiles, but tough shit.

Capping off the whole package are the not-at-all bland looking tile-based environments that dominate the game. Five or six tilesets are used for the entire duration of the original campaign. See one building interior or crypt or forest and you've seen them all. The game shows its hand in the first four hours of the game, giving you nothing to look forward to for the next thirty-six hours.

Despite these complaints and more, I'm still going to try and kneecap this bloated, ancient, fantastically awful game. I'm operating on the assumption that with enough reviews vetting its legitimacy as "the fulfillment of a genre" and "a brilliant and highly polished RPG masterpiece," it has to get better. It simply has to.

I just keep picturing myself eight years ago, a young wiry lad gripping the expertly marketed small-box game in my hands in some god forsaken aisle of Wal-Mart. I was promised adventure, a superb Dungeons and Dragons experience from the makers of Baldurs Gate. Eight years later, I'm only marginally closer to shutting the book on this abomination of dated graphics and eye-rollingly awful fantasy storytelling. I can't let my past self down. I must go on. I must triumph. "You didn't sacrifice your entire Market Basket paycheck for nothing!" I scream across the space-time continuum. Then Grimgnaw dies again.

Vibrant Story Review

2010-11-30T00:25:00.011-05:00

Why even teleport? I could just start a new game of Vibrant Story.

The softer side of me wants to write a foreword to this piece, wherein I discuss the value of beginner game projects like Vibrant Story. I'd talk about how it was important for there to be a creative outlet for younger folks interested in designing games, and how their efforts should be rewarded with constructive criticism instead of critical evisceration at the hands of jaded writers. Then I recall the game's introduction.

In only forty-six seconds, Vibrant Story puffs its chest out, arches its back slightly, then takes a huge, sweaty dump on the creative medium that gaming wants so badly to be. "No," Vibrant Story defiantly announces, "games really are for fifteen-year-old Japanophiles and their friends. No artistic legitimacy here."

I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's start at the beginning.

Vibrant Story is an independently developed "game production" created by one Thomas C. Morrow. How do I know Thomas C. Morrow made it? Because he (Thomas C. Morrow) credited himself (Thomas C. Morrow) no fewer than nine times before the game ended. "But if a creator has the confidence to flamboyantly paint his name all over something," you wonder aloud, "surely it must reflect its superior quality?"

You're wrong.

You're so goddamn wrong.

Pick an aspect of the game and Vibrant Story will go out of its way to disappoint you in it. The writing? I'll let the game speak for itself:

And the game's completely moving and not at all absurd ending:

Spoiler alert! A guy who acts like a murderous, power hungry dickhead in the first minute of the game ends up being a muderous, power hungry dickhead at its conclusion! The "twist" ending is made more ridiculous by the fact that Zach is regularly invited to cook meals for people in their own homes and rescue people from swamps. Because that's what demonic, ill-intentioned supernatural beings do. They make pizzas for people and steal wishing orbs from other poorly written characters. Oh, and the chick's parents died a long time ago and she never gets to see them. Deep.

So the story is a chunky shitshow. "But," hopeful readers might point out, "plenty of games have gotten by on their mechanics alone. As long as Vibrant Story plays well, its hopelessly vapid plot won't matter." Again, Thomas C. Morrow (of Thomas C. Morrow fame) aims to disappoint the hell out of his game's players.

Take the Alchemy (crafting) System. It's pretty deep. It has to be because merchants don't sell higher tier weapons and armor. Better gear is supposed to be crafted by the player from basic items found around the world. Fair enough, but there's a major hitch in the system. You can buy any crafting material you need from the outset of the game. Worse, it's possible to buy cheap raw materials, produce a huge batch of, say, healing potions, then sell them right back to the merchant for a huge profit. This ill-gotten money can then be used to purchase the materials for the best armor and weapons in the entire game, cutting out any sense of progression.

Pop Quiz: Which piece of gear should my character NOT be wielding at level 7?

You'd think having access to infinite amounts of wealth and equipment would feel like cheating. But when the majority of the game's treasure chests contain only five to twenty gold pieces and lame sounding crafting materials, any guilt evaporates. Why would I slay a dungeon's endless population of monsters to secure a chest containing a "patch of rat fur" or "sticky glue?" Moreover, bosses and creatures don't drop loot at all. You're constantly reminded of this. At the end of EVERY battle a window pops up and exclaims "No items found." Thanks, Thomas C. Morrow (of Thomas C. Morrow fame) for robbing me of any sense of achievement as I trudge through your godless, anime wasteland.

So the story isn't one for the ages, the crafting system eliminates any semblance of challenge, and loot is distributed with the all the stinginess of a cancerous old miser. "Tell me," naive readers might persist, "that the combat is at least satisfying on some level." To that I say No.

Note that the above image is directly from the game, and not photoshopped by me for comic effect.

After every basic attack, players are urged to slam their space bar as HARD as possible in bright blue Impact font. Vibrant Story's QTE system gets old four-to-five seconds after you find out it has one. Oh, and if you can't hit the space bar in the 1/1000th of a second the game requires, it dickishly calls you out on it, making you feel like an awful person- like the way people in marketing feel when they realize they've sold their souls for a middling salary and a 401K.

This masochistic slapstick doesn't end with inane reflex mini-games, though. Certain special attacks crash the whole fucking game. Casting "Throw Weapon" sometimes causes the screen to go black and this window to unceremoniously appear before booting you back to desktop:

It's like the game is trying to put itself out of its own misery. I respect that.

Pressing F12 also crashes the game. Using the Alchemy System sometimes crashes the game. Having your mom yell at you to get off her Dell or roughhousing near your computer will also probably crash the game.

It's usually at this point in a review where I'd cite something I liked about the game. With six hours and forty-seven minutes invested in this atrocity that probably less than ten people in the entire world have played, I only found one positive thing about Vibrant Story. One. And it's the most obscure thing about a game I've ever liked, loved even. Guess. Guess it. I'll wait.

Ready?

MY MAN!

This game has black people in it. That's right. A game produced in the bowels of some adolescent's bedroom to the Final Fantasy VII soundtrack has more racial diversity than most of the AAA titles released this year. Spike Lee would be proud.

For those that need it spelled out for them: No, there aren't any redeeming qualities to save Vibrant Story. I never found myself enjoying the game. The closest I came to feeling anything resembling joy was realizing that I could game the Alchemy System to mint endless cash. Even then, the crafting recipes are so convoluted that it devolved into MMO-esque grinding. The writing frequently shifts into indecipherable gibberish. The combat is tedious and unsatisfying. In so many words, this game is a blight upon the face of the earth, a no-survivor train wreck of anime face templates, hardcore music, and every wretched JRPG cliche in the book.

That said, I recommend you play Vibrant Story. Witness its shortcomings firsthand. There are so many bizarre, Lovecraftian horror scenes that I couldn't properly fit into this article. Here's a few of them:

Part of me still feels guilty for tearing apart this amateur effort. But if games like this aren't dredged up from the murky depths of the internet every once in a while, who's to say we won't have a pandemic of awful JRPG inspired games on our hands? Who's to say that tidal waves of there/their confusing adolescents won't storm our capitals and pillage our women and grammar handbooks? Consider Vibrant Story a warning, a cackling specter of what may come if we don't hold our children to standards higher than a Naruto fan-fiction forum.

Carry out your God-given duty. Download and play and this awful game.

Easily Add Gimmicks!

2010-11-29T00:38:00.000-05:00

I've been rooting around a couple of RPG Maker sites as of late, looking for the subject of a piece I'm working on. It occurred to me during said rooting that most people probably aren't familiar with the PC-based RPG Maker series, and the horrifying sub-culture that surrounds it. Let me introduce you to the most painfully voiced trailer of all time.

In short: "Anything your heart desires."

Talkin' Blocks

2010-11-23T13:28:00.001-05:00

Rock Paper Shotgun threw up an interesting, if not hugely deep, interview with Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft. He discusses plans for the future of the game, how his life has changed since raking in tons of block-world dough, and his newly formed game development company.

Markus ‘Notch’ Persson Talks Minecraft | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

The Old Stuff

2010-11-18T22:11:00.000-05:00

Boy oh boy is this new Deus Ex 3 trailer entertaining. From the improved hacking mini-game to all kinds of stealthy gameplay, it's chock full of everything. I'll spare you the frame by frame analysis and direct you to the much enlightening Eurogamer interview with the lead designer.

As for my take, I think this trailer only confirms that Eidos Montreal is taking the game seriously, infusing it with the gameplay facets of the initial Deus Ex while making it far more accessible to the console generation. I like.

The End is Nigh

2010-11-17T09:51:00.001-05:00

So the internet is in a proper furor over the 36 frames of footage depicting Bioware's new game. My snap judgement? Welp, there is definitely a gruff looking soldier with a gun. Not a fancy laser gun, mind you, but a gun that looks like it fires conventional ammunition. The setting, as best as I can tell from said 36 frames, looks near-futurish.

Now, every overly critical cell in my body wants to go ahead and say "Great, another cover-based shooter with a space marine," but I'm resisting it. Mass Effect 2, for all the bitching the internet did over it, was fantastic. The shooting was tight, the tedious elements were removed, and the plot-determining decisions, compelling party members, and writing were left fully intact (I have a feeling we'll be seeing the same with Dragon Age 2). Bioware took the shootiest, space marine-iest material and made beautiful, addictive hay with it.

So too do I think Bioware can take the dull, gunmetal gray territory of modern shooters and make something infinitely playable and compelling with it. Of course there's always the possibility that this could be the company's first major post-Jade Empire blunder. But The Old Republic seems to be intently gunning for that honor.

Edit

Hilariously, a commenter on Rock Paper Shotgun pointed out that the rifle the man is wielding could be an Incisor, a sniper rifle from Mass Effect 2. So is this just a You-All-Saw-It-Coming reveal for Mass Effect 3? Surveys point to probably.

They'll Damn Us All

2010-11-16T09:16:00.000-05:00

If any sort of deity decides to alight from the heavens to judge the human race, it'll be morning commuters that will get us condemned. Virtually no hope for the entire species can be discerned from watching the swerving, turn signal shirking masses that clog the interstate from eight to nine in the morning. I believe that said deity would gaze upon the writhing stretch of metal, glass, and pavement and simply decide he himself could not exist alongside such a godless mess.

And I'm talking about a first world nation. My commute lasts only thirty-five minutes and six exits on I-93. But even in that short distance, I've borne witness to every kind of exercise of idiocy, forgetfulness, and disregard for other people's safety than I'm comfortable scribing: the woman driving a gigantic Navigator drifting across three lanes while she holds her Blackberry inches from her face; the ragged, early-nineties Civic precariously weaving into every possible hole in traffic because its black rims and awful exhaust make its driver Mario Andretti; the clueless elderly couple doing fifty-nine in the passing lane because they missed the exit for Cracker Barrel and can't fathom why anyone else would want to go faster than them.

All of the above examples contribute to a terrible gallery of universal archetypes that inhabit the freeways we brave every morning. The more sane or considerate of us form the passive backdrop on which these reckless drivers paint their garish self-portraits. Somehow we find a happy medium between being a hair's breadth away from slamming into the car ahead of us and going faster than a horse and buggy. Most of us signal when we want to change lanes, never mind three of them. Hell, I'd even make the daring argument that most of us -- the safely driving majority -- consider the cars around us when making critical driving decisions. Numbers from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) might corroborate this hunch.

2009 was a pretty "good" year for fatal crashes in the United States: 30,797, down from 34,172 the year before. Last year also marks the lowest point in a declining trend since 2005 (39,252). It's beyond the scope of this short piece to identify the reasons behind this decline, but who am I to nitpick a positive trend?

Still, culling numbers from a government data table does little to make me any less angry at lipstick applying women in their gigantic SUVs, or ball cap sporting hoodlums and their rusted out, lowered BMWs. Nobody likes inconsideration, perceived or actual. Surely there can be some bit of knowledge that can make me feel better about my horrible morning commute? Some image that can comfort me about my over-reaction to something people deal with every day in stoic silence?

I present a moderately trafficked intersection in India:

Fallout 2.5

2010-11-14T16:24:00.006-05:00

Upon beating New Vegas, one can't help but feel like the boys at Obsidian had some kind of long standing vendetta to fulfill. It's as if Chris Avellone and Feargus Urquhart made a blood pact when Black Isle's Fallout 3 disintegrated: "We won't rest until we can continue the expletive filled, bug ridden, arbitrary antagonist capped, sex-and-gun fest that we started in Fallout 2." Having recently finished New Vegas, I can say that this fictional pact has been fulfilled.

It's not even that New Vegas is a bad game. It's not. Metacritic and the rabid basement dwellers at No Mutants Allowed can attest to that. Hell, so can Ice-T. I invested twenty-something hours in my first play through, and I already have another character rolled up and roaming around the wastes as I'm writing this. So what's the problem? Well, it's a question of mechanics and content.

Mechanically, Vegas is a rickety-ass mess. I'll excuse the crashes to desktop and quest crippling bugs- that's par for the course in a Obsidian/Interplay/Troika release. But enemies that goofily roller-skate around me, shooting accurately from the hip while spamming the same exact taunt repeatedly ("How do you like the taste of your own blood")? Not so excusable. The problem feels like it's gotten worse since Fallout 3. Players are robbed of all satisfaction when they manage to stab or shoot an enemy; they don't bat an eye or flinch. When they do react to having their limbs crippled, they immediately break into some kind of morbid, badly animated dance, making lining up your shots in real time that much harder.

Even V.A.T.S., the darling of E3 previews two years ago, feels like it's let itself go. It's lethargic, undependable, and finicky as all hell. Sure, you'll have a 95% chance to hit a Fiend in the head at 20 feet on open ground. But god forbid there's a blade of grass in between you and him, your odds of hitting said Fiend plummet. Real time shooting hasn't gotten any better. If anything, the new iron sight option only further reveals how inept Bethesda's engine really is as a shooter. This problem is exacerbated by the larger amount of enemies Vegas throws at you in a single go. Being hacked to death by six or seven Legionaries while you awkwardly unload a 10mm clip into their unfeeling faces at point blank is horrendously frustrating.

Awful combat excluded, Obsidian's other changes to the formula are a mishmash of good and bad. Perks now arrive at every other level, as per the original Fallouts. Armors now deal in damage threshold values instead of straight damage resistance, and multiple types of ammo return along with weapon mods. None of these things necessarily improve the game so much as just making it more complex for complexity's sake.

Take the different kinds of ammunition. In older Fallouts, juggling the kinds of ammunition your character used suited the games' slower, turn-based pace. Changing ammo in New Vegas, however, is an exercise in annoyance. Doing next to no damage to a heavily armored enemy with nifty assault rifle because you've run out of armor piercing rounds blows. It makes you feel neutered, and your gun have all the impact of a scrunched up tissue. Between this and the devolved V.A.T.S., you can see why I rolled up a tire iron wielding bruiser this time around.

But not everything Obsidian has tinkered with in New Vegas has been detrimental. Non-combat skills have found new life in most aspects of the game, from unique, useful perks to greater integration in dialog trees. Quests feel much more structured and open-ended. In truth, the narrative as a whole feels much more similar to Fallout 2 than the Bethesda-flavored offerings of Fallout 3. Despite reviews crowing that Vegas is merely "more of the same," those with an appreciation for older titles in both the Elder Scrolls and Fallout series will see that New Vegas is a natural continuation of Fallout 2; a fact I'll examine more closely in part two of this piece.

Rally Bound

2010-10-29T21:54:00.001-04:00

In a little under three hours, I'll be on a chartered bus headed for our nation's capital. What I'll find when I arrive there, I'm not sure of. I know I'll laugh. I can guarantee that. But as far as whether or not Jon Stewart has the ability to make all those in attendance really feel like their country isn't on the precipice of absolute insanity, I don't know.

Edward Murrow, whose work is about as far removed from Stewart's as possible, comes to mind. The man told it like it was, no matter how unpleasant. See the Buchenwald broadcast. But he was a legitimate journalist. He seemed, at least to me, to be beyond the corrupting touch of slanted idealogical dogma. Of course both men have/had their own personal biases, but each of them put the truth above everything else. That it's fallen to Stewart, a satirist, to call out people on their bullshittery is a weird sign of the times.

So will the rally Change Everything for me? For America? I doubt it. Moreover, that's not its goal. But I think it'll be heartening to be in the presence of people fed up with the mock deadly seriousness of American politics. "No, the country is not about to spiral into oblivion," we'll say, "so let's all have a few laughs." And in doing exactly that, we'll be uniting instead of divvying ourselves up. We'll call attention to what we have in common instead of what separates us. The rally, shitty or not, will at the very least be a victory for rational thought and critical thinking.

There will be detractors: Partisans and anarchists and pro-choicers and tea partiers and WHITE ANGRY FOLKS. I'm sure of it. But moral or idealogical purity isn't the point, here. It's rational thought. It's measured, thoughtful reactions to what's happening in our country, rather than the foaming at the mouth, "us or them" rhetoric displayed by both sides. That's no good. It doesn't get us anywhere. Better to laugh at the ridiculousness of something than to rant and rave about it.

But this whole post has gotten too heavy. I'm going to DC to laugh at a comedian while he swears up a storm on the National Mall. I am stoked.

Better Than the Former

2010-10-05T22:10:00.001-04:00

If you have any interest in the next entry in the Dragon Age series, I urge you to head on over to this bluntly honest preview and take a gander. While fans of the first game are already bemoaning the removal of a fully customizable character and the "dumbing down" of the combat, this preview is more concerned with the overall brownness in the game's presentation, and contrived storyline. The the sharpest bit of the piece:

"It’s exciting because it does some new things, such as having a new storytelling style that can potentially weave a touch of anarchy into things. At the same time though, it’s marred by many of the same flaws that plagued the first game; the excessive bloodiness, drab fiction and endless expanses of brown textures."

Here's to hoping that Bioware is saving the best aspects of its human-oriented sequel for last.

Ruin on the Horizon

2010-10-04T13:46:00.002-04:00

As an aging twenty-something, I realize that my body has become weirdly compelled by certain circumstances. For example, after most large meals, I horribly crave black coffee. There's no rhyme or reason to this biologically. It's just a purely Pavlovian routine burned into my neurons. In much the same fashion, the arrival of fall usually brings on a dire urge to see what's going on in Azeroth. And so it was last night, after twenty or so minutes of agonizing consideration, I committed to a one month subscription and downloaded the Public Test Realm client. What follows are my uninformed findings.

First of all, I'm going to loudly proclaim here and now that Blizzard's adoption of streaming technology for their client is amazing. Seriously, after only downloading four-hundred or so megabytes of the test client, I was able to hop on my newly copied shaman and start messing around with my talents. Kudos to you, Blizzard, for keeping your tech current in nearly all aspects of this game.

The next thing I was struck by was the slickness of the interface. In addition to some stellar re-skinning of spell icons and other cosmetic items on the default UI, there was a pronounced, high-resolution newness to everything. Leveling up has this extremely good looking graphic that slowly fades in to your screen, with your newly attained level appearing in a classy golden font, followed by any abilities you have access too. The spell book is a hell of a lot roomier now, and the stats window on your character sheet has been stowed in a neat little slide-out sidebar. Very, very high quality stuff, Blizzard.

As an ignorant loner who's never really applied himself to raiding and higher end aspects of the game, I can't really analyze the gameplay changes in any meaningful fashion. That said, I think the elimination of multiple spell ranks is bloody BRILLIANT. No longer is there a sense that your lightning bolt, rank 2, is under-preforming, with a trip back to a major city for training looming in a level or two. Moreover, the addition of specialization bonuses upon getting your first talent point makes choosing a path feel like an accomplishment. A slew of other changes also make feel the lower levels of the game feel less like a tutorial than a separate action/adventure RPG. Seriously, this patch, despite some of its stranger bugs, is oozing polish.

Again, this was written with barely a night of play on the test server, so my views are obviously only going to be skin deep. The only things I bring to the table are five years of experience with the game itself and my usual discerning eye for games in general. That said, I can confidently say that Cataclysm is shaping up to be a nicely crafted injection of revitalization for the workhorse MMO.

What these things don't necessarily point to is my own interest with the game. A cursory glance at my account subscription history shows a decided ambivalence with this most addictive of all games. Sure, the attraction will always come in fits and starts, but the actual playing of the game doesn't seem to last beyond the three month mark. And while I have no doubt of Cataclysm's pedigree, the finest breeding in the world can't make a treadmill any less a waste of time. Assassins Creed II and Civilization V, on the other hand, are still peering over my shoulder sinisterly.

Pete Campbell is Always Sad

2010-08-30T17:30:00.000-04:00

The Old Terror

2010-08-25T15:10:00.003-04:00

The original Diablo has managed to eek out a unique place of its own in my mind. While Mass Effect and Bioshock have to squabble over bunk space in the "Games I Enjoyed as an Adult" room, Diablo gets all the space it wants in the "Scared the Hell out of You as a Child" wing of my brain. Even today, roaming around the 256 color environs of the cathedral, I'm still put on edge. The music, the sound the warrior makes when goat men stab him with rusty pikes, the shuffling animation of the zombies- it causes old, familiar parts of my brain to stir, residual pangs of fear bubbling to the surface.

Atmosphere reigned supreme in Diablo. And while its descendants benefit from modern game design principles and Blizzard's endless budget, they don't strike the same chord as the fledgling action-rpg did. Which isn't to say that they're free from violence and mature themes. Hell, there were more body parts and severed limbs in Diablo II than the original could dream to throw at you. Yet the Butcher from the first game, along with his vicious taunt and cleaving animation, still makes me wince when I open his door.

I concede that a large part of my ingrained fear of the game stems from the young age I started playing it. I would have been ten in 1997. It's no small feat to scare the hell out of a ten-year-old, especially with an opening cinematic like this:

Combine that with the ominous war drum menu music and violent menu item selection sound, and you've made clicking the "New Game" option an exercise in overcoming terror itself for anyone under thirteen.

But Diablo, even today, doesn't have to resort to cheap fun house tricks to draw you into its world. The soundtrack is consistently unnerving, with creepy vocal tracks and sharp strings. The camera is close up on the action, with lighting always in short supply. Creatures crawl, shuffle, or caper towards you in their uniquely horrifying fashions. Death animations are horror movie-esque spectacles of violence, my absolute favorite being lobbing a Hidden's head off, which hits the ground with a satisfying THUNK. Blizzard North's attention to macabre details is what truly submerges you in their dark world.

Thunk.

Thirteen years later, there's still a lot to marvel at. Assuming you utilize this handy fix for the Windows 7/Vista color problem, the game plays remarkably well. While the absence of a run function might stymie younger gamers used to Diablo II's faster pace, the idea of traipsing through sixteen levels of blood and guts to hack apart a malevolent boss character holds up. Factor in item collection, spell books, and stat point allocation, and the recipe for full-on, sleepless addiction remains.

Much like its namesake, Diablo remains a near-immortal force that beckons to the unwary. Only, you know, instead of souls, it demands hours of your life. And instead of possessing the body of a child, it possesses a single compact disc. A horrifying compact disc. I've gone as far as I can with this analogy.

Adventure Gaming Documentary Exposes All

2010-08-12T12:34:00.001-04:00

The boys over at Rock Paper Shotgun have not-at-all-hastily thrown together this documentary about John Walker, a professional Adventure Gamer. It's not an easy job judging by the sheer amount of pie eating and chest push ups required. But I digress.

Note: Impossible Feat

2010-07-27T07:32:00.000-04:00

Somehow, SOMEHOW, I was able to wake up at 7 am this morning after playing a single match of Starcraft II last night. I'm finally becoming an adult.

Raw impressions: I really dig the in-game cutscenes. I like that in the display options menu it tells you which options rely more on your GPU and which rely more on your processor. Also, really enjoyed being able to Party up with Chris last night through Real ID. Still, I'm going to kind of miss going into our old private Bnet channel, "itsagundam."

Not so hot on the default mouse scroll speed. And, even after having limited access to the beta, still not used to the 3D-ness of it all. I'm an old coot.

Off His Game

2010-07-26T19:36:00.002-04:00

There are things that Don Draper can do that command awe from me: Persuading clients with rousing speeches, deftly bedding gorgeous women, verbally (and sometimes physically) pummeling the hell out of people that deserve it. Don Draper is capable of immense feats of manliness. But in the premiere episode of season four he's unable to pull off any of them.

Our anti-heroic mad man blows up on prospective clients, can't find a single useful thing to say to a reporter, and doesn't get laid without paying. Don's one shining achievement that should have been the centerpiece of the episode (the Glo-Coat commercial) instead serves as a problematic shadow cast over the company. In twenty-three minutes, the golden boy of Madison Avenue becomes a public relations liability for the fledgling ad firm.

Thankfully, Don is not alone in his post-divorce, post-Sterling Cooper rut. His ward, Peggy, has a covert publicity stunt blow up in her face and must beg Don for money on Thanksgiving. Henry and Betty, last seen triumphantly flying to Reno for a quicky wedding, are now dealing with the reality of living in the ashes of Don's former life- as well as the reality that Betty, with or without Don, is an awful parent and nearly incapable of higher thinking. "She's a silly woman," Henry's mother tells him after an awkward Thanksgiving dinner. It's the absolute truth.

But even in this nadir, Draper has his moments. Trying to talk Don down from evicting himself and Betty, Henry pleads "Don, it's only temporary." "Believe me, everyone thinks this is temporary," Don fires back. Seeing the two men sparring face-to-face feels like the perfect conflict to build up throughout season four, and I wouldn't be surprised to see the men use their immense leverage against each other.

The rest of the cast, sans the losses from the coup of last season, also get their inaugural time to shine. Roger, probably the most well off of the bunch at the season's outset, makes quips about Don's post-marital sexual encounters. Cooper's obsession with the far east has manifested itself as a conference room without a conference table (its absence "demands conversation"). There's also a running gag around the office about the "second floor"- a desperate lie to make their headquarters seem more legitimate to clients - that comes up at least four times, each funnier than the last.

I was initially anxious about season four, feeling like maybe the Mad Men writers had run out of rope since the jaw dropping ending of season three. But after forty-seven minutes back in the universe of whiskey lunches and big-bosomed secretaries, all my apprehension has disappeared.

Even so, Don better get to punch Henry in the face.

Farewell to the Azerbaijan

2010-07-23T01:43:00.001-04:00

The boxy red truck pulled off my lawn, on to the drive way, and finally down the road as I stood on the porch clutching a toolbox. The Rover's growl faded as I looked back at the scorched spot on the lawn it once inhabited. Goodbye, expedition truck. Goodbye, money pit. Goodbye, spirit of adventure on four wheels.

The Azerbaijan was a 1991 Range Rover my dad bought for me in a fit of ill advised inheritance spending. Its birth was controversial. My mother, having a grasp on financial reality, was against it. As was my girlfriend ("Don't you already have a car?"). But, much like a hopelessly weak soul bargaining with the devil, I couldn't resist. I egged my father on. I had to have a Rover if he had one. We bought it in haste, having a Land Rover club member giving it only a cursory inspection before my dad wrote out a check for the thing. For eleven-hundred dollars, I was now an adventurer.

Classic Range Rovers, by their nature, are weirdly beautiful things. Boxy and angular, they look like they crawled out of some 1970s jungle expedition. Mine was no exception. Painted in a dramatic Portofino Red, it sat at least two feet off the ground. It sported knobby all-terrain tires and an aggressive looking brush bar. Crowning it was a roof rack that you could carry a whole other car on. It was the most masculine object I've ever owned.

Just the feel of the thing as you rolled down back roads- it seemed you could grow a full beard just by driving it. The fact that you sat at least six inches taller than even similar sized-trucks definitely contributed to this, but there was something about the truck's aura that commanded a deep, primal respect. I wouldn't be surprised if it was revealed that Rover engineers had designed the engine to feed off the testosterone of its drivers.

But beyond its chest-hair-inducing aesthetic, the Azerbaijan managed to maintain an air of civility and class. This was no mud spattered Jeep, or a hillbilly's flatbed pick up. This was a Land Rover. It wouldn't look out of place parked out front of a lord's manor, or flooded up to its axles in a jungle river. Though my model was spared leather seats, it still had a heated windshield, power everything, and an auto-dimming rear view mirror. The Azerbaijan had equal parts off-road capability and luxury, and I reveled in it.

Still, for all its immaterial benefits, the thing was as reliable as an ancient pull start lawn mower. Its brake lines rusted out, its heater core burst, the tailgate rotted away to nothing, and the check engine light seemed to be stuck on permanently. For every day I effortlessly cruised down a road or navigated a trail, I spent at least three days with my stomach in knots over repair costs.

Worse than sweating repair bills was spending days at a time troubleshooting a problem on my own. But at least with this came the benefit of experience under the hood. If nothing else, the Azerbaijan was an exhaustive lesson in automobile dissection and repair. I traded bloodied fingers, grease stains, and cursing fits for the arcane knowledge of mechanics. Radiator replacement, power window motors, oil changes- the truck had forcibly imbued me with the ability to look at the underside of any vehicle and confidently describe what I'm seeing.

But the days of peeling back the layers of my truck to access its inner workings as well as nervously checking out my bank balance are behind me. The truck has passed from me to an older gentlemen who has tentatively promised to keep the rolling box of testosterone intact. I'm relieved, but it still stung to watch the great beast of a vehicle rumble away from my driveway for the last time.

The legacy left to me by that truck is at once tangible and sentimental. Thanks to the Azerbaijan, I've finally wrapped my brain around car-speak and auto repairs. Moreover, I'm left the memories of adventures that were only possible behind the wheel of the rugged expedition truck. I felt what it was to look down a path with full confidence and romp the gas pedal, not at any point questioning the integrity of the machine at my disposal.

I named the truck 'The Azerbaijan' after a country whose territory I'll likely never see with my own eyes. It's simply not in the cards for a poor New Hampshirite like myself. But in naming the truck after an obscure name on a map, I took a stab at the heart of adventure. Bombing down muddy trails and climbing inhospitable terrain in a pedigreed expedition truck seemed to get me closer to the Exotic Wilds of Far Away than my imagination could.

That's the tragedy underlying the loss of the Azerbaijan. I'll miss it more for its ability to transport me to the heart of adventure more than the comfort of its seats, the growl of its exhaust, or its crisp red paint job.

Blizzard Buckles Down

2010-07-06T17:02:00.001-04:00

I've never been a fan of the official Blizzard forums. In their current state, they're a warren of angry resentment towards Blizzard, incomplete sentences, and awful things said to other people in the name of power gaming elitistm. But no more.

Blizzard announced today that users of their forums will be posting under their real names, courtesy of the new Real ID feature. They will go into effect July 27th, coinciding with the release of Starcraft II.

Massive bitching ensued, with most people arguing that moderating private forums is somehow illegal, or Blizzard is infringing on their constitutional right to free speech without accountability. Others believe this is part of a shadowy agenda by Blizzard to further...lose sales, I guess?

Do not get me wrong. There are going to be negative consequences to this decision, as outlined by the ever eloquent gentlemen at Rock Paper Shotgun point out. But the benefits are going to far outweigh any inconveniences for individuals.

For starters, how about accountability for racist, demeaning, or uselessly stupid posts? No longer can people hide behind their level one toons in order to harangue members of the forums and trigger flame wars over trivial aspects of the game. Trolls will now have a real name to go with their fake posts. Even if they change their personal information, they'll have a single name that can be blocked across all of Blizzard's games.

In terms of practical benefits, that might be it. The rest of my hopes are extremely improbable. Will the quality of conversation on the Blizzard forums actually increase? Gems have come out of the wastelands, Alamo's druid guide being one of them.

But by and large, forums, even well behaved moderated ones, are made up of cliques. Outright hostilities might not cease, but the constant bickering and elitist attitudes held by some members will never end. Read any post at No Mutants Allowed. While I wish otherwise, it's not realistic to expect Blizzard's forums to turn into a conversational paradise overnight.

Regardless of my analysis and expectations, it's a miracle to see Blizzard taking such drastic action on such a widely used forum. Regardless their views on it, Blizzard's customers are going to be shoehorned into this new frontier of discussion. I'm thrilled to see something like this up close and personal, and I'm sure that PC talking heads everywhere are going to be watching how this pans out with bated breaths.

Ghost in the Deus Ex Machina

2010-07-01T23:59:00.000-04:00

Once again I find myself facing three difficult choices that would affect the fate of the entire world. I could merge with a sentient AI, and hope that it would rule in humanity's interest. I could assassinate a man who's ascending to godhood via nano-augmentation and the use of universal constructors. Or I could plunge the world into a second dark age by destroying the hub of all global communication. Decisions, decisions.

It's strange to play through the entirety of Deus Ex as an adult. I first beat it sometime in my high school years, when my mind was ablaze with hormonally induced angst. Talk of Illuminati, Majestic 12, and black budget funded think tanks seemed like a backdrop to my own fantasies of being a super spy, living as JC Denton. Deus Ex was less a parable about technology, freedom, and globalization than it was an outlet for teenage escapism.

But this time around, I found myself more attuned to what the talking heads of the game are saying, checking their values against mine. Especially towards the end of the game, where JC's Infolink becomes an echo chamber for philosophical discourse for all the supporting characters. Tracer Tong wants humanity to start over from scratch. Morgan Everett wants to bring back twentieth century capitalism and pyramid-structured power. Helios wants to run the world like a gigantic ant colony. None of the solutions to game's problems sit well with me at all, yet I must choose.

Most distressing is Paul's input on the situation. JC's brother, who I saved from Hell's Kitchen in a gunfight of stupidly large proportions, simply tells me that I'll make the right choice. Paul, the man who dragged me into the world of intrigue, insubordination, and existentialist contemplation, doesn't even offer up a 'good' solution. He just trusts me. It's one of the more emotional conversations of the game. Not in a gut wrenching, overly dramatic sad way- Deus Ex spares its players attempts at that. No, the conversation between JC and Paul is comforting, reassuring. It steels you for What Must Be Done.

On the mechanical side of the game, time hasn't been kind to Deus Ex. Design missteps I forgave in my early teens seem outrageous now. Why in hell can't I silence the pistol I've already dumped tons of weapons mods into? Why aren't the guards reacting as I cattle prod their hapless friends only three feet away? Why does Paul die if I kill everyone in the 'Ton Hotel, but still go out the window? (That last one was especially infuriating, as I had to trash two hours of play so I could trigger Paul's survival condition "properly." Which meant exiting the Hotel entrance instead of a bedroom window. Damn it, Ion Storm.)

Flaws aside, there are things that hold up magnificently. Even as teenager, I appreciated the way Deus Ex was a game about resources. Your health, lockpicks, multitools, bio-energy levels, they're all resources which you must successfully manage in order to proceed. Before you picked a lock or bypassed a keypad, you had to ask yourself "Is there another way around this obstacle?" There could have been tons of alternatives - datacubes, e-mails, nano-keys, vents - that could save you time, effort, and resources. Probably the biggest joy of playing this time around was using the GEP gun as my unorthodox skeleton key, blasting open locked doors, vents, and chests. Somehow the idea had escaped me in my youth.

The world of Deus Ex is vast. Not in the sense of a Bethesda or Rockstar game, but in the sense of detail. There's just so much crammed in each map. Liberty Island alone had me obsessively searching every corner of it for weapons mods, ammo, and lockpicks- often at the expense of ammo and lockpicks. And when you can't find anything useful, you find quotes from all kinds of literature. Newspaper excerpts, personal e-mails, and written audio logs further flesh out the social and political climate of JC's time.

The world feels...well, like a world. Sure, most of the levels are surrounded by the same bland nighttime cityscape and obvious barriers. But it feels like things are happening beyond the vent shafts and military complexes you're sneaking through- like Paul's failed raid on the NSF, and the rioting at the clinic in Hell's Kitchen. Even when you're not around, events unfold and the plot thickens. If there was ever a device missing from the current, player-centered gaming scene, it's other characters' plot threads running in parallel with your own.

The atmosphere's further strengthened by its supporting cast of characters. From the outdated agents, Anna and Gunther, to the whitebread bureaucrat, Joseph Manderley, there's no shortage of interesting people to meet in Deus Ex. Astoundingly, most of them aren't overdone fictional devices. Yes, Hermann Gunther is more or less a bad Schwarzenegger knock-off, but he's got tons of more field experience than JC. It feels like he could have gone on and had decorated, if bloody, career if you had never crossed paths. The characters have a trajectory, a sense that they had lives going on before they encounter JC, and it's constantly referenced, even thrown in your face by some of them. It feels like you really are a gifted rookie butting heads with hardened field operatives.

Given the wealth of golden qualities possessed by Deus Ex, I'm hesitant to choose any one of them to end the piece with. Probably because, taken out of the context of the game, they'd look lackluster at best. The story is a passable Shadowrun/Neuromancer homage. The sandbox gameplay is now a staple of the games industry. JC Denton is possibly the worst voiced game character of all time ("A bomb!"). Only irrational fanboys would argue otherwise- and would then be immediately dismissed by anyone with a brain.

No, Deus Ex is a singular, unique experience with no peer. It stands in my mind as this bright flash of brilliance. It's flawed, of course, but it plays straightfaced, unwilling to break character. And you go along with it, picking locks, rooting out conspiracies, and nuking Area 51 because you are, in fact, JC Denton, and you're going to to save the world.

I flush the coolant from the blue fusion generators and make my way back to Sector Three. Tracer Tong's idea is drastic, but I decide it's the right thing to do. Humanity would have a better shot starting over than trusting others to clean up Bob Page's mess. I disengage all the ion locks before a technician turns on me. I blow him up with a LAM and hit the engage button. I sprint out of Sector Three as Tong's voice fades into static: "If you receive this, if you survive, find us."

Ten Years of Meph Runs

2010-06-29T16:56:00.001-04:00

Has it been ten years since Diablo II already? Blizzard has a short but sweet write up on their game's achievements, set to some familiar music. Music that had me pensively staring at the install button for Diablo II on my Battle.net account.

I remember eagerly putting the game on hold at my local Electronics Boutique the day it came out- a mean feat for me because, at 13 years old, I was still terrified of interacting with adults over the phone. The box, which I still have stashed away somewhere in my attic, was amazing. Diablo's wretched skull adorned the cover, in all its three-dimensional glory. The inside flap showed the scene from the above image- large scale battles, outdoor environments, and spells of all colors being thrown around. My whole world, the box promised, would be flipped upside down. It was absolutely right.

The next four weeks were spent in isolation. Much like the necromancer I marched around via mouse clicks, my exposure to sunlight plummeted. My eyes strained at the 640x480 resolution for blue, green, or golden items with which to attain more blue, green, or golden items. This would define a ritual I would engage in annually since those four weeks.

The original Diablo, a staple of my desktop shortcuts, now seemed old, decrepit, and far behind the times. No running? No deserts or jungles or outdoor combat? No skills? Laughable, I thought.

And this was all before I ventured online. The experience was totally pure, unspoiled by the rampant power gaming and impossibly stupid economy that governed online play. It felt like my character's own personal journey through the events I had indirectly brought about in the first game. As dumb as it sounds, I really played through Diablo II for the narrative the first time around. That's since been mostly ruined by horrid bouts with the Ladder.

Nonetheless, I'm blessed with all the memories of those first few weeks. I remember getting to Act II and being woefully under-equipped and underpowered to handle the lighting bolt spewing scarabs and fire resistant skeletons of the desert. I remember being sincerely angry about Griswold's descent into undeath, and Wart's fate at the hands of a bunch of goat men. I remember being mortified by Andariel's mostly naked form poisoning me and my golem, then trouncing me with her gross shoulder pincers.

It feels strange to say I've been doing anything consistently for a decade. But sure enough, Diablo II has probably claimed more hours of my life than any other piece of software. Here's to ten more memory-filled years with its successor.

Mass Effect 2 Review

2010-06-28T15:10:00.003-04:00

Bioware played me like a cheap fiddle. They opened Mass Effect 2 with a potent combination of top notch voice acting and writing, pyrotechnics, and heart wrenching sentimentality- which then seamlessly zips you right into a character creation screen and an in-game tutorial masquerading as an 80s movie rebirth montage, complete with swelling, inspiring music and borderline cheesy narration ("We've recovered Shepard. Project Lazarus is a go."). But goddamn, is it good.

The opening of Mass Effect 2 is a whirlwind tour of everything that makes the game, as a whole, magnificent. Flavorful dialog options, a result of one of your many choices from the first game, and high quality visuals and writing. In a sea of developers droning on about cinematic gameplay and meaningful choices, Bioware stands as that rare team that can deliver on their promises in the first five minutes of their games. Eat your heart out, Bethesda.

But opening aside, has Mass Effect 2 outgrown the awkwardness its predecessor sometimes suffered from? Namely the awful inventory management and buggy, unsatisfying combat, and horrid vehicle sections. At the five minute mark, the game screams a resounding "Yes!".

Gone is inventory management. It's been stripped out and replaced with research. Instead of rummaging around in locked containers for YET ANOTHER Blade Shotgun and Mantis pistol, you and everyone on your team gets access to whatever your research can provide. Upgrades are generally all squad based, so things like stronger shields applies to everyone who can use them. Individual squaddies have unique research options, so you can get Garrus a meaner sniper rifle, for example. In one stroke, Bioware has eliminated the needless comparison-based outfitting that bogged the last game down ("Does Tali get Shredder rounds or Tungsten rounds?").

Fuelling the research are resources, which are gained from scanning planets for material nodes and launching probes into them. This new aspect of the game has replaced the vehicle exploration segments from the original. No longer will you be able to drop down to a world and drive around on one square kilometer of it in a terrible handling rover. Instead, You'll scan the planet from orbit and pillage its resources from the comfort of the Normandy. I found it a little less engaging than the exploration, but it works. On occasion, you'll encounter random anomalies which you'll be able to explore on foot, but these are the exception.

Along with research, character advancement has been similarly pruned and sharpened. Characters now have only a few skills to focus on, with ammo types being folded into these. This is probably the most welcome departure from the original. The result is tighter feeling progression that, while offering less abilities than the original, feel incredibly potent in battle sooner. While investing ranks in abilities still only advance them by scant percents and durations (".25 more seconds of stealth!"), the final rank of the ability allows you to choose how to evolve it. Incinerate, for example, can be evolved into Heavy Incinerate, which does more damage over time to a single target, or Mass Incinerate, which afflicts more targets in a wide area. The skill system feels easier to navigate and infinitely more satisfying to use in combat.

Which brings me to the heart of ME2's gameplay. In a move that's surely alienated some die hard fans of the original, every aspect of the game feels like it was tuned to support the new combat direction. Gone is the awkward cover and floaty camera. Now you're looking right over Shepard's shoulder, ala Resident Evil 5. Gone are grenades and overheating. Instead, weapons function off universal thermal clips, which serve as conventional ammunition, like in most shooters. The weapons have been tuned to be punchier, louder than they were in the original. Indeed, Shepards of all classes now use heavy weapons. These do everything from disintegrating enemies with a concentrated beam to blowing them off the edge of a cliff with a well placed grenade round. In short, the combat feels less like a third-person Deus Ex and more like a smarter Gears of War. And here's where the review goes off the rails for some folks.

For all that's been said about the removal of features, and the streamlining of statistics and abilities, some may worry that this isn't a Bioware game at all. That it's some kind of weakly veiled Gears clone that caters to rowdy college kids and Madden playing bro dudes. To those naysayers, I say you're wrong. Mass Effect 2 is every bit as much of an RPG as Baldurs Gates. You journey the world acquiring interesting squadmates, making decisions that affect the plot, and spending a ton of time conversing with people.

Arguably, my favorite aspect of Mass Effect 2 was getting to know my squaddies and eventually helping them with their own personal missions. Given, some of them are better written than others, but every character has at least a few lines of amusing dialog. Plus, helping them unlocks new abilities and a secondary outfit for them, so even the meatiest headed players have a reason to get invested in them.

Despite its strong writing and excellent supporting cast, Mass Effect 2 does have some minor flaws. On the technical side, I've been able to get my Shepard stuck in all sorts of places- up on cliffs, up on crates, etc. These are very rare occurrences, but they do require reloading to get out of. Squad control, while a great deal better than the first game, is also a bit spotty. Telling your companions to move anywhere feels like more of a suggestion than a command, and your team will regularly vault over cover and right into enemy fire. Finally, for all the great writing present in the smaller areas of the game, the overall plot feels a little cliched. The suicide mission thats been touted in the game's previews is especially disappointing in terms of its conclusion. Though I have to admit the final boss looks awesome.

Mass Effect 2 feels less like a sequel to the first game than it does a new step in the RPG hybrid evolution. It manages to fuse character development, well written conversations, and relevant plot decisions with the gameplay of a third person shooter- and it does so exceedingly well. This title sports every bit of Bioware polish afforded to any of their other IPs. It doesn't feel at all like the pushed-out-the-door sequel that detractors professed it would be. At about forty hours long, this game is an easy recommendation to make for Bioware fans and shooter-action players alike.

Writing for the Space Ages

2010-06-26T17:03:00.002-04:00

I've been plodding through Mass Effect 2 the past couple of days. Plodding has a negative connotation to it, but when you've unlocked all the secondary outfits and loyalty abilities, there's little left to do before the suicide mission besides cruise around the galaxy exploring every single star cluster and scanning for anomalies.

Even in this aspect, the anemic planet exploration, Bioware manages to cram in interesting writing. One planet might have a couple of sentences: "It has forty moons and several dust bands." But others have two, three paragraphs dedicated to events that could be whole games in and of themselves.

The stand outs are obvious. One description is an account of how the planet's population split along anti and pro-slavery lines. A civil war engulfed the place for two or three years, with the abolitionists winning at heavy costs. Another planet is famous for the fact that it has the galaxy's largest graffiti laser-etched into its surface by a surly Russian space miner. Still another planet is a graveyard of rusting ship wrecks, and its description highlights the government's effort to rebrand itself as a more tourist friendly recycling planet in the face of criticism from the Galactic Council.

And all the while, your codex, the in-game equivalent to Wikipedia, is filling up with more details like that. Origins of the numerous races you encounter, the technology that powers the ships, weapon and defense information- Planescape: Torment may be famous for its sheer amount of wordage, but I can't imagine the volume of information that's contained in both Mass Effects. Still more will be present when the third one comes out.

Bioware should receive some kind of government grant for cramming so much literature into a Gears of War 2-RPG-mash-up. Somehow they've made these geeky products palatable to the masses, despite them being chock full of enough sci-fi lit to make the Babylon 5 fandom blush. Mass Effect 2 stands as a weird anomaly, an impossibility that deserves its own codex page.

So Many Words

2010-06-23T15:41:00.004-04:00

Happy tenth birthday, Deus Ex! Rock Paper Shotgun had numerous posts yesterday dedicated to one of the finest, uncategorizable games of the twenty-first century. Aside from wishing it the best, I also have some timely good news. News that even jaded bitter old timers might enjoy.

In a piece over on VideoGamer.com, one of the Human Revolution developers is quoted as saying:

"The voice recording, with all the characters we have in the game, is just amazing," producer David Anfossi told VideoGamer.com at E3. "We have more than... I think it's more than 200,000 lines."

This can only bode well for the newest member of the Deux Ex family. At least, it should stave off some of the bloodshed that's sure to overwhelm the internets on the game's release.

Via [VideoGamer.com]

Thanks for the Memoriis

2010-06-23T00:53:00.002-04:00

It's with little fanfare that I bid farewell to my underutilized Wii. Sure, we had some good times, as evidenced by the above picture. Zelda: Twilight Princess was getting interesting at the four hour mark. Smash Brothers: Brawl piqued my interest with its inclusion of Solid Snake and Ice Climber Twins, but it was only a fling compared to the long time relationship I still have with the original.

Still, the Wii and I never connected. I think it had to do with the fact that I never had the raw drive to buy and play through enough of the platform's solid titles. I've heard good things about No More Heroes, Super Mario Galaxy, and Mega Man 9, great things, even. But not the compelling testimonials I'd hear about games like Fable II, Skate, or Red Dead Redemption. Wii always seemed to me the odd man out, getting only the left over or gimmicky titles. The fact that I can't even play DVDs on the damn thing is just another nail in its coffin.

No, the Wii goes to a better place to someone who can put in some quality time with it. Just like a neglected pet is better left with a shelter and the possibility of new owners, so will my Wii go to a new household that might appreciate it more. As for the funds procured from its sale, I'm considering snagging one of those newly down-priced, refurbished Xbox 360s. With most of my friends on the Xbox Live bandwagon, it'd be an easy transition. And I really, really want to play through Red Dead Redemption.

Here's to the memories, Wii.

Human Revolution Shaky-Cam Footage

2010-06-21T08:38:00.005-04:00

Presumably ballsy video game journalists recorded the Deus Ex 3 E3 demo and my oh my does that game look good. Transhuman bar tenders, security hacking, Arkham Asylum-esque takedowns. Human Revolution is shaping up to be a proper successor to Warren Spector's masterpiece.

Of special note is the cyberpunkish combat music, lots and lots of dialog, and the ability to preform non-lethal takedowns. The visuals may also cause seizures because of their neon-noir beauty. It looks like Blade Runner but smoother and more dingy, if that's possible.

Enjoy these videos while they last.

Update:
Looks like the videos have been quashed. Sad face.

Via [RockPaperShotgun]

V for Violence

2010-06-20T21:06:00.004-04:00

Since I saw the first trailer for the re-booted Mortal Kombat game, my hopes have been extremely high that the series would be back to its M rated roots. After viewing this six minute trailer, complete with fatalities and tag-team mode being demoed, things are looking even better.

Of particular note is the persistent body damage the fighters sport, the ultra-gory fatalities, and the 2D-only combat. The whole skeletal/internal body zoom thing also looks neat, but the awful Fight Club game sported something similar. Boy was that gimmicky.

Still, horrible bone breaking violence in two-dimensional arenas seems to be a better fit for the Mortal Kombat franchise then a Teen rated superhero crossover

Video Link [via www.GamingEverything.com]

X-COM is Scary

2010-06-20T14:24:00.000-04:00

Fact: there's nothing worse than accidentally guiding an unarmored X-COM (not XCOM) operative into a fiery green sectoid laser round. There's a scream, then the agent's body collapses, and all their acquired veterancy has been immediately lost. The action takes only a split second, but you're stuck with the grim leftovers for the remainder of the mission. Unless you reload your turn-by-turn save you've been keeping, that is. But where's the drama in that?

X-COM is a strange beast. It has a shotgun blast of elements from other strategy games smooshed into one ambitious, if badly aging, title. It features branching research and development, tactical combat, and RPG statistics, all within the context of a global military organization management sim. It's sheer madness presented through a pesuedo-3D globe and 2D sprites. X-COM is a time rift view of what gamers from 1992 thought we were going to do with all our modern multi-core processors and water cooled video cards. Only we didn't.

Instead, gaming evolution veered in a new, streamlined direction, leaving X-COM as a dead end offshoot of its family tree. Yes, others came, but they died out by the 2000s, leaving X-COM as a kind of tragic anti-hero. It would be embodied by a burned out detective who insists on wearing a suit at all times, only drinks straight whiskey, and calls women "skirts" and "dames" without blinking. It's unapologetically old-fashioned and complex. "Tutorial?", X-COM would growl at you, "Read the goddamn manual. It's 137 pages for a reason, you dolt." Then it would use eleven time units to spit in your face.

X-COM is terrifying. Both in terms of how tense its missions can be and how much depth it packs into its twenty-three megabytes of hard disk space. Hour upon hour could be lost to resolving the virtual struggle between man and alien. Even in terms of gamer culture, it lurks in the background of everything, a massive, unknowable Old God of Cthulu-ian proportions. One that's available on steam for five bucks.

Justify: Fallout 3

2010-06-17T21:48:00.001-04:00

It astounds me that I still have a shortcut to Fallout 3 on my desktop. It has impressed me so much, that I've decided to jot down some reasons why it's still there.

A Man and His Gun
Bethesda is no master at weaving Bioware-level plots. Sure, there's bright spots: I still like the Replicated Man quest line, and heading back to Vault 101 after all hell's broken loose is pretty cool. But the main quest might be the least compelling story line in a million-unit selling title to date.

Thing is, that all gets brushed aside when it becomes apparent what Bethesda does brilliantly: giving their players an entire world to explore as they see fit. I love stumbling out of the vault, donning my ratty Utility Vault Suit, and just wandering the wastes, killing and looting as I see fit. No game has come close to simulating scavenging the burned out shell of civilization with only a bolt action rifle and a dog for protection.

Power Gaming
There's guilty pleasure to be had in tweaking stats, items, and perks in such a way to produce a statistically superior character. It's the cold, sterile antithesis to my first two reasons, really. The drive to do so probably shares the same part of the male brain that admires efficient, powerful engines, or the machining of a rifle. It's a necessary, pervasive evil, and one that I'm powerless to resist. Fallout 3, again, simply hands you a system and allows you to do what you will with it.

The Setting
Lore and background information in any of the Fallouts is something of a mixed bag. Fallout 1 is probably the most pure and intriguing. Fallout 2 is filled with both brilliant streaks and infuriating nonsense (Talking Deathclaws! Frank Horrigan!). Fallout 3, similarly, is a cocktail of potent badness and praiseworthy bits.

I really like creeping through deserted corporate headquarters, hacking into research terminals, and reading memos, notes, and emails that have little to no bearing on the game, but flesh out an area or the setting. Some are depressing; there's a log kept by a woman police officer dying of radiation poisoning. Others are more lighthearted, like the marketing and research notes in the NukaCola plant that detail the introduction of NukaCola Quantum, and Clear NukaCola. Fallout 3 has a shotgun blast of lore bits like this throughout its world, and I'm still finding things I've never found before.

Conclusion
Fallout 3 is gigantic. It's a massive expanse of content accessible through your computer screen, able to be explored in any manner you wish. It's compelling in a way that unexplored jungle ruins or treacherous mountain caves are; you seek to conquer it because it dares you to, not because it politely nudges you towards its conclusion. It's a title rife with rough edges; spotty writing, a lackluster plot, and horrid animations and voice work are all present. But, like a battered, reliable expedition truck or a beaten up bolt action rifle, it's built for longevity and reliability. And that is why Fallout 3 is still on my hard drive.

New 'New Vegas' Details

2010-06-17T16:21:00.002-04:00

A bunch of new details have been revealed in a fan interview over on the Bethesda official forums. Of special note is the re-introduction of traits, from the original games, a revamping of perks and skill point allocations, and the elimination of stat-altering collectibles, like Fallout 3's bobble head dolls. Quotes after the break!

Josh Sawyer: During character creation, you will have the option to select one or two traits. Traits include some of the classics, like Small Frame (in F:NV it gives a bonus to AG but you break limbs more easily), and new ones, like Four Eyes (bonus to PE while wearing glasses, penalty while not).

Traits were an integral pat of character building in the first two Fallouts, so this seems to be a return to form for the series- something the No Mutants Allowed crowd has been lamenting since Bethesda attained the game's rights.

Josh Sawyer: Yes, there will be something similar to bobbleheads in the game, and you'll receive an in-game reward for finding them. That said, they do not give you SPECIAL or skill bonuses when found.

I always thought it was a little lame that finding collectible items in the game world were a necessary part of your character's growth in Fallout 3. Again, Obsidian seems intent to get the series back to its 2D roots.

Josh Sawyer: There are ways to win the main plot by killing no one and by killing everyone. It was one of our initial design tenets. You will find it difficult to get by as a pacifist, and you will miss a great deal of content by killing everyone you meet, but it can be done.

This is a biggy. Though pacifism is a road seldom traveled by most Fallout players, just knowing the option was there was comforting in a kind of geeky, empathetic way.

Again, this new information reaffirms Obsidian as trying to both please old school fans of the game as well as bring the title back in line with its predecessors. While I'm all for more complexity in my games, I just hope they don't go kitchen sink crazy, ala Alpha Protocol, and heap too much on us mere mortal gamers all at once.

XCOM Intel Round Up

2010-06-16T14:57:00.001-04:00

News about the revived XCOM title has been coming in at the pace of a slow, IV bag drip, but here's the best bits arranged for your reading pleasure.

A frank, at times awkward, interview with 2K Marin
An eyes-on preview by the same author
Kotaku's pretty pictures of the alien investigation simulator
Joystiq's impressions

The first item there, the Alec Meer interview, is really the gem of the bunch. Besides a traumatic exercise in PR-press conflict, you get a sense of who exactly is behind the title, as well as their artistic influences and expectations.

The concept of the new title remains unchanged across all the previews: investigate/research aliens to better combat them in the field, maintain a base, and save humanity. But a large emphasis seems to be put on an atmosphere of dread and unknowing; something that seems right up 2K Marin's alley, considering their work on Bioshock.

Still, the internet burns with old school gamer hatred, and these previews will most likely only fan the flames.

Tapping the Night Away

2010-06-16T02:22:00.000-04:00

A Scene: Me sitting across the table from my unnamed friend who is clad in boxers and a shirt that’s far too small for his frame. Between us on a cluttered table are Magic cards. It’s 12:03 AM. We exchange witticisms and insults as we tap, untap, draw, and discard our beat up cards. This is the very essence of basement-dwelling geekery.

Magic the Gathering: Duel of the Planeswalkers captures absolutely none of the above scene. It’s about as far away from that gross display as developer Stainless Games could make it. In fact, aside from the card flavor text and art, Planeswalkers seems like a sterile doppleganger of the beloved tabletop game.

Gone is trading and deck building. Forget exchanging rare cards with friends or opening virtual booster packs to bolster your collection. Instead, you unlock new preconstructed decks by advancing through the single player campaign. It's a straightforward affair in its own right, with no story connecting the battles; only a list of enemies that must be defeated in one-on-one duels.

New cards are unlocked by winning multi-player and single-player matches. Each deck has twenty such cards for it that are added to your deck as you earn them- no futzing around with substitutions. Your deck automatically expands to accommodate the new cards automatically.

But before these barbs put you wholly off from buying this game, listen to the good bits. The actual gameplay reflects the snappy mechanics of the tabletop game; for all intents and purposes, this is real Magic. Some of the more mechanical phases aren’t displayed (Draw, Upkeep, etc), but they’re present. With a little option tweaking, you’re able to target yourself with damage spells, buff other players creatures, and generally preform all the outlandish maneuvers that advanced players would want to try.

Visually, this game is the equivalent of Magic: The Gathering porn. All the cards are authentic, featuring sharp looking art from all over the game’s timeline. Even on a 22” monitor, cards don’t lose their visual fidelity. By default, there’s numerous animations for spells. Shock will send a lightning bolt at its target, for example. I found the combat animations a little long, but they can be handily disabled in the options menu. The magic effects aren’t flashy enough to be intrusive to the experience, and they, along with the themed playing fields, add a good amount of atmosphere to otherwise number-crunchy card game.

Planeswalkers is also blessed with a solid array of play modes. From the cut and dry campaign to customizable duels with AI opponents, you will not be hurting for ways to play Magic. Of special note is Two-Headed Giant, which allows you and a friend to take on other duos with shared turns and life pools, and Challenge mode, where you have one turn to defeat your opponent in a pre-set scenario. Essentially one-shot puzzles, they’re hugely rewarding when you figure them out, though it’s sad there’s only eight of them included in the basic game.

Still, the game is plagued with a few issues. First is the UI, which is still very much calibrated for a big screen TV and Xbox 360 configuration. One of the loading screen tips even states “Use the D-Pad to change camera angles.” Speaking of d-pads, you won’t be able to play the Two Headed Giant Co-Op Campaign unless you have a 360 controller plugged in. That’s about three degrees from ridiculous for, of all things, a turn based card game. As of this writing, there’s no option to play co-op over Steam, but there are murmurs on the forums of a patch addressing this travesty. Heaped on top of these problems are several game crashing bugs and a total absence of in-game communication. This is not the cleanest release in the Steam store.

So should you buy this blemished yet utterly playable scrapper? At ten bucks, it really comes down to how much you love Magic. The core game gets you eight decks, online play, and eight challenges. I have to stress that, because of its card-based nature, the game can be played for hours, with no one match resembling another. Indeed, much of what makes the table top game so compelling translates pretty well into its digital counterpart (sans the collecting and trading, of course). And the ability to challenge your friends to late night duels without the need to get out your big box of cards, counters, tokens, and life counters is attractive in its own right.

In short, Magic the Gathering: Duels of the Planeswalkers is no replacement for the real deal. More discerning nerds should definitely stick with Magic The Gathering: Online. For those who get the Magic bug once in a blue moon, but don’t want to spend cash on the hobby, Planeswalkers is an easy recommendation.

40K MMO Comes to Life

2010-06-15T14:50:00.002-04:00

While not the most inspired looking MMO to come out as of late, it's still impressive to see the miniature-based figures of Dreadnauts and Chaos Space Marines stomping around and tearing each others' heads off.

Especially dubious is the UI that pops up halfway through the trailer. Images of Star Wars Galaxies immediately popped into my head. The Orks also seem a tad familiar.

Nonetheless, here's to hoping a fifteen or ten day trial is available at launch to sate my nerdy desire to jump a space marine bike over a canyon.

Slick as All Hell

2010-06-14T15:10:00.001-04:00

The new 360 looks pret-ty, pre-ty slick if I do say so myself. The new, shiny black color scheme, integrated WiFi, and 250 GB hard drive - all for the same price of $299 - make it look like a tiny little PC tower. All of which is kind of scary. This move seems to be reinforcing the notion of longer console cycles in the vein of a decade and a half.

Still, if there was ever a time to stop holding out from buying one, it's now. One could either pony up three bills for the new model or cash in on stores clearing out their old inventory.

Oh, it'll be hitting stores by the end of this week. Thrilling.

The Case for Laziness

2010-06-14T12:53:00.004-04:00

So "Project Natal" has become Kinect, and Microsoft has confirmed it's going to try and get its player base flailing around awkwardly in front of their 360s by the end of the year. I stand a man intrigued.
Part of me hopes Kinect may represent the most primitive first steps down a new avenue of gaming innovation. It could be the kind of super immersive entertainment promised to us in the 90s by so many lame looking virtual reality rigs. We'll kick in front of us to break down doors, cock an invisible shotgun in our hands to reload, and uppercut our friends to preform Fatalities. But then as soon as you picture the ridiculous scene of out of shape Modern Warfare dudes hiding behind their coffee tables for cover, or standing on their feet for more than an hour of multiplayer gaming, the dream crumbles.

Precisely who wants to be on their feet for a four or five hour gaming session? One only needs look to the 'waggle to slash' mechanics of Zelda: Twilight Princess to illustrate the weakness of binding controller input to physical action; it's effing tiring. Two or three rounds of Wii Boxing still somehow winds me. Do gamers of the future really want to physically preform a watered down equivalent of what their character's doing on screen?

Practicality also rears its ugly head in this discussion. Is moving your arms and body around really equivalent to the highly acclaimed 360 controller? Consider tense shootouts in Gears of War, or the demanded precision in Demon's Souls. Is the Kinect or Move up to replicating that kind of accuracy through gestures and skeletal recognition? Based on even the Wii Motion Plus, one would come to the rational conclusion of "Not even close."

The whole affair reminds me of a purchase I made in my early teens. A deadly combination of naiveté and relentless print advertisements had convinced me to buy a Microsoft Sidewinder Game Voice. I reasoned it would allow me to dominate Age of Empires Zone matches with the power of my voice. In reality, it was a superfluous piece of software that buffered every in-game action with a second or two of voice processing- a virtual death sentence in any kind of competitive game. In a week I was back to using millisecond keystrokes to build my barracks and select my shotgun, the Game Voice gathering dust at the bottom of my closet.

In short, it's easier to press 'x' not to die than to wave your arms to reload. Whether or not the next generation of gamers will shake their heads dismissively at our ancient, ergonomic 360 controllers and keyboards as they bat giant balls away from themselves on the screen remains to be seen. My money is on the universal constant of human laziness.

Oh the Anticipation

2010-06-14T00:11:00.000-04:00

The internet itself is salivating over the sheer amount of content that's going to be artillery barraged down our gullets in the next week or so. Surprisingly, PC gamers won't be totally left in the cold. Deus Ex 3, XCOM, Shogun 2: Total War, Dragon Age 2, Elder Scrolls V- the sky itself is dark with the shadows of so many looming titles for our aging, punch card operated computers.

I await the flow of information eagerly.

Tired Tradition

2010-06-12T14:11:00.010-04:00

Have you heard about the end times? The imminent arrival of the single most destructive event in the entire whole of human history? No? Then let me enlighten you, mindless consumer drone. Brace yourself for two doses of undeniable truth that indeed show the world as we know it is heading to a fiery end. Ready?

X-COM is getting a sequel. As is Deus Ex.

Neither sequel looks, pixel-for-pixel, like its predecessor.

I'll let the wailing and gnashing of teeth subside before I continue. What's that? You're a rational human being not enslaved to the Terrible Old Gods of PC gaming? You don't understand why comment threads and message boards are consumed in the flames of "Tradtion or Death!" over decades old franchises? Well then, let me educate you, even-tempered individual, as to why there are roving bands of soothsayers spreading doom and gloom where ever these new titles are mentioned.

I'm not going to pretend I can pin down the psychology of those golden few who've taken it upon themselves to smear the new titles. But allow me to provide a general sketch of these folks. They're people who, like many other less vocal individuals, played the original X-COM and Deus Ex at the time of their release and have enshrined those titles in their minds as absolutely sacred. Any deviation from those original titles' formats, in these persons' minds, is a profane blemish upon divinity. Kind of like how North Korean peasants are taught that Kim Jong Il is divine and infallible.
But just like how dictators with cults of personality are almost always, er, flawed, so too are the original titles. For all its strengths, the original Deus Ex was an ugly, over-complicated game. The combat was awkward and jarring, the stealth was absurdly implemented, and there was an abundance of useless augments and skills.
Yet these glaring pitfalls are glossed over by nostalgic forum-goers and fundamentalist fans. What people actually loved, and still love about the game, is the concept of multi-solution obstacles and the freedom of character development. It didn't hurt that there was some really great writing throughout Deus Ex, too. No, it would be downright ignorant to say that Deus Ex was an awful game. Universal critical acclaim and the very existence of a new sequel show otherwise.

Still, the rabid fans that are in hysterics over the lack of the original main menu song are missing the point entirely. They seem to be obsessed with the physical details, the window dressing, instead of the game's concept itself. Like if I were to complain that the year 2010 sucked because it didn't have a 9 in it, like the year before it. Or if I claimed my girlfriend had become a different person after a haircut, even though it's the same woman underneath.
In the new Deux Ex, you will still be an augmented agent rooting out conspiracies through any number of means at your disposal. In the new XCOM, you will still lead a squad of fresh recruits against an unknown, horrifying alien menace. Both, however, are being created in an environment vastly changed by hardware and gameplay innovation since the originals' release. And it will show. The games themselves will be more accessible, awkward gameplay nuances will be streamlined out, and the graphical styles will be completely different. That's the universal march of progress which, unfortunately for some, is a terrifying, inescapable thing.
But while a few crotchety old men shake their canes and wrinkly clenched fists at these new fangled titles, the rest of us moderately tempered gamers look towards their release with a sincere curiosity and optimism. We'll judge these games not on the grounds of how rigidly they adhere to the dated mechanics and aesthetics of their predecessors, but on their own merits of quality and originality. Hopefully we'll not be disappointed.

Manly Absurdity

2010-06-11T13:36:00.001-04:00

Something has to be mentioned on this blog about the amount of brilliant, manly writing that's present in every aspect of the whole Steam-Coming-to-Mac initiative. It's genius. Raw, testosterone soaked genius. Above is the superhumanly masculine Saxton Hale punching through the window of an Apple store. Note his chest hair that grows in the form of Australia. This is how Valve introduces Team Fortress to Mac users, and I love it.

Looks Conspira-tastic

2010-06-08T11:12:00.006-04:00

I've mixed emotions towards another entry into the Deus Ex franchise. On the one hand, I'm a bitter geek who has enshrined the original Spector designed masterpiece alongside the 2D Fallouts, Dwarf Fortress, and System Shock 2. On the other hand, I acknowledge that bringing some titles into the twenty-first century have proved amazing. See Fallout 3, Bioshock, Dragon Age. Updated mechanics tend to be better mechanics.

As for the setting, I'm out and out thrilled. I like the idea of indiscrete, loud mechanical augmentations. One look at our new protagonist, Adam, and you get the picture. I like that. I like that a lot.

However, don't know if I can get behind that cheesily voiced narrator. But I sure as hell can get behind corporate espionage carried out with bulky mechanical augmentation. For the sake of comparison in voice work and acting, here's the intro to the original.

Oh Tom Hall, where have you gone to do your voice work now?

Ultimate Beta Test

2009-12-27T02:31:00.002-05:00

Astute readers will notice the "Archive" suffix on the blog's title, as well as a cleaner, lighter presentation. No, nothing's broken. No, I'm not giving up the game. Instead, I've decided to take the initiative and move NCY off the venerable but constraining Blogger and on to its own custom site. The code is all my own work, no template needed. Because of that, I need my most loyal readers to venture forth and put my code to the test. Please break that site and report your findings in the comment section for this post. Also feel free to tell me what you think of the style direction. Do it.

-Jon

Avatar's Magical World of Awesomeness

2009-12-22T18:52:00.008-05:00

"And there is always some poor kid who has a sucky life but then he's visited from someone from a hidden world of awesomeness who explains to the kid that the kid is the chosen kid and everyone is waitin' for him to fight and to win and to accept treasure and to accept love and to rule the hidden world of awesomeness like the handsome little asshole that he is...I guess every one of us is just hoping to turn out to be one of those forgotten chosen ones, right?"

In about five lines of text, Brad Neely sums up what is at the heart of the genre of movies known as "Geek Epics." Luke Skywalker was some poor kid who had a sucky life- his aunt and uncle were brutally murdered at the hands of the empire, but then Obi Wan came to tell him about the hidden world of awesomeness that was the force. Frodo's life in Lord of the Rings was less sucky, and one could argue that his life actually suffered more as a result of venturing out into the "hidden world" outside of the shire. Still, he was ultimately venerated as the hero that spared Middle Earth from annihilation and accepted much treasure. The formula at the core of both epics is the same, and I think that there's something about it that speaks directly to the heart of everyone that's ever wielded a virtual sword or rolled up a fantasy character of some kind to venture into lands unknown. So it comes with little surprise that James Cameron's Avatar, sticking very closely to the above recipe, ultimately delivers on the epicness, but not so much on the artfulness or intelligence.

But before I get hip deep in plot details let me get the visuals out of the way: They are, indeed, astounding. I had the benefit of seeing the film in full 3D. Amazingly, it's devoid of all the cheap "LOOK WHAT'S COMING OUT AT YOU FROM THE SCREEN" effects that mar most bad 3D horror movies. Instead, Cameron opts for a more subtle use of depth which does more to accent the movie's elaborate set pieces and tech wizardry than it does to prop up the whole movie. A good move, because even without 3D rendering, the CGI in this movie is going to serve as a substantial benchmark for all visual effects to come. Of note are really sweet looking portable holographic displays that several characters liberally brandish, Pandora's more-than-exotic flora and fauna, and the planet's native alien population, the Na'vi. In short, it looks great. But the plot. Oh, the plot.

Avatar is a formulaic epic through and through. Goes like this: Gruff marine with no heart and a surplus of testosterone ventures to a frontier world where he must live among and be accepted by the tribal native population and prevent a profit-obsessed corporation from ruining the lush world. It's Dances With Wolves, Disney's Pocahontas, and The Matrix all in one and my god it is derivative. The film's events are incredibly transparent, playing out so logically and so sequentially that you'd swear you'd given the movie's script a read-through before seeing it. You know how the movie will end as soon as our hero, Jake Sully (what a charmingly jockish name) sets foot-- I'm sorry -- wheel on Pandora. Which brings me to the maimed cripple marine himself.

I disliked Jake Sully for a good forty-five minutes of the film. Actually no, I hated him. Hated his labored marine "OOH-RAH," hated his tough guy accent, hated his Parris Island buzzcut. Hated the way he lamely-unfolded his wheel chair and goofily rolled off the back of the transport he arrived on (Not forty-five seconds later some similarly dumb looking marine merc utters "Meals on wheels!"). Jake Sully, as a character, is like if someone asked a typical New York Times website commenter to describe someone from Alabama. The fact that Cameron tried to wedge a disability into the mix (presumably to make a grim-faced marine even more stoic) makes Sully somehow more bland and stereotyped. This is all ignoring the fact that having a debilitated ex-marine as a hero allows Cameron to take some pot shots at the veterans' benefits in 2154 and what the Corp does to a man's psyche.

Yet when minute forty-six rolled around, the little black seed of hate the film had been nurturing within me began to wither. For all his terrible dialog, for all his hackneyed personality traits, I began to get behind Jake Sully. His buffoonish efforts to win over the tribe combined with Sigourney Weaver's begrudging mothering all but eroded the sharp edges of my hatred. If Ghost Busters queen, Sigourney Weaver, was able to see past her intellectual elitism and befriend this crippled, badly written shell of man, who was I not to? By the film's last climactic battle, I was rooting for Jake. Sure he was a hopeless, ROTC-reject dope at the beginning, but he had been through things. He had fought and won. He accepted treasure, gotten over his sucky life, and ruled over a world of awesomeness like the handsome little asshole that he was. Jake, at the film's conclusion, achieves what every nerdlinger and geek, deep down, desires. And for us geeks, it was pure catharsis.

Avatar's existence is solely derived from a well established formula for an epic sci-fi and fantasy mash up movie. There are no twists, there are no real existential or life changing questions posed. Arthouse film geeks will probably decry this thing as some kind of assault on their arthouse film geek values. Yet despite these glaring "flaws," Avatar achieves what it sets out to do: win its general viewers over with mind boggling visuals, and win over its geek and nerd viewers with an epic fantasy tale with space marines. Simply put, it succeeds and is not a terrible ride. Most astounding, at least to me, is the fact that Cameron got it done in one two-and-a-half hour movie. I'd argue that that's the most brilliant aspect of Avatar. I didn't have to wait four-and-a-half years to see what I knew was going to happen happen. In the end, though, I think whether or not you'll find the movie anything more than a really great looking diversion comes down to your enjoyment of sci-fi fantasy epics and the themes contained therein.

Or if you know what Catachan jungle fighters are. If you do, you'll like this movie.

-John

Re-console-iation: (Un)Holy Goddamn

2009-12-07T12:43:00.012-05:00

I approached Castlevania thoroughly a coward. The most exposure I had to the game was a few bit attempts on an emulator I had a long, long time ago, and a recent attempt by myself and two scruffy art kids to best the game in a sitting. We never made it past the underwater section of level 3. So you can imagine how, when I finally got the game loaded up on my completely unaltered, legally unmodified Wii, I approached it; with grit teeth and a sense of false manliness. So began my trek through Drac's supidly designed castle.

Now, with a wimpy background like mine (filled with tactical RPGs, Dos-6 looking Dwarf simulators, and far too many Microprose games), you'd think my controller-reflexes would not be on par with the horridly demanding regimen required by Castlevania. You would be WRONG, you underestimating sod. After I mastered the art of the falling chain-whip strike and the use of secondary weapons, I was a veritable killing machine, rarely having to rely on save states for most levels. I deftly leapt over Medusa heads and beat the living hell out of those monkey things at the beginning of level 2. It was glorious, and suddenly the window dressing of "THIS GAME IS BRUTAL" started to fall away. That is until the end of level 5.

I liken the Grim Reaper boss of level 5 to 9/11. It was a shattering of my innocence, and the beginning of a bout of fear and frustration I wouldn't get over for hours. Time and time again, his goddamn whirly scythes cut my poor Simon Belmont in twain. Over, and over, the dreaded "Huh-uh" exclamation of Simon and the depletion of his precious life squares punctuated the end of my many attempts to best the purple-colored sprite of Death. I had hit the classic 8-bit platformer wall, as it were.

After numerous attempts at overtaking him with my dead man's hand of 80% life and the throwing axe, I consulted YouTube for an illustrated example of how to best the purple menace. The answer, it seems, was the cross boomerang. Fair enough. But my save state, taken shortly before the boss's lair, meant I had to retrek down the infamous hallway of medusa heads and suits of armor to get the only one in the level. So began my struggle. Know it ended well- I did in fact secure the cross boomerang and retraced my steps with full health. But know that it was secured only after tens of failed attempts. How an average fourteen-year-old was supposed to ever this game upon its release is beyond me.

Eventually, after more tens of attempts, I delivered Death from this mortal realm and was left to tackle the final few stages of the game. The race to Drac's lair was on.

And then it was over. Relatively quickly, I might add. Aside from the judicious use of annoyingly flight patterning bats and monkey-carrying-eagles at the beginning and middle of the stage, respectively, I was faced with the ugly green stairs that lead to the final confrontation. Despite the ease in reaching them, it was kind of thrilling knowing the final fight was upon me. Nerd thrilling, like when you feverishly watch a live broadcast of the Venture Brothers panel from Comic-Con, or when you first open a Magic: The Gathering booster pack. What would it be like?, I mused. The answer: harrowing.

See, the last fight in Castlevania is the only boss fight in the game that has two sequential stages to it. Each one begins with Drac at full health, while you have no means to replenish your own. And so for the duration of the fight there's this fantastic tension that works itself into your finger tips. It only becomes apparent to you only once you're faced with the Game Over screen and your hands have fused with the controller to form some kind of sweaty, jittering, Hellraiser-esque limb. I don't think I've ever invested so much attention to repetitious patterns and reflexes to a game before.

And so when Dracula finally fell to my numerous whip strikes, when the first images of daylight for the entire game's duration finally made their way on to the screen and Drac's castle rumbled below the surface, I felt a palpable sense of accomplishment. Not from the plot, or the sense that I had improved as a person or found closure in knowing any of the characters' fates. But from my own accomplishment of honing my reflexes and knowledge of the game. I was elated at my own self-mastery, I guess.

Reflecting upon my digital victory now, however, I cannot tell if I'm merely mining my own experience from an otherwise wholly bland, brutally paced game, for a kind of justification for Castlevania's existence. Do I have to? Again, though some would argue against me, there's barely a shred of story or character progression in the game itself. Really, you're presented with several obstacle courses with which to surmount with a limited toolset. That is the entirety of the game. As much as Simon Belmont has become venerated as a classic platforming hero, there's not whole lot going on in the game's narrative to drive a player to beat this game. So that must leave only the old "beating to say you did" motive, no?

As much as I pander to myself about the motives behind beating games, I think I have to accept that developers of the era were not considering the "whys" of player motivation. They simply plopped down in front of gamers this gnarled, punishing test of reflexes and said to the masses "Have at it." And just in that principle of design, there is something to be respected, if not necessarily imitated. To sum up my admiration of Castlevania, and to an extent all platformers of the time: I like it for many of the same reasons I like old expedition trucks; for their relative simple but efficient composition, their lack of polite, civil niceties for people outside the hardcore demographic, and the way that you could look at both and instantly assert that they both originated in more brutal, less forgiving times.

-Jon Lynch

Re-console-iation

2009-11-30T01:53:00.003-05:00

Looking guiltily at the overview of NCY's posts, I see that the last one I made was about my romance with Sega Saturn's Daytona. And that the post was made two weeks ago. What a sad state of affairs. Welp, I'll do my usual bit by saying that my semester's end is within sight and so my energy has been directed into schoolwork as opposed to, say, writing about all the gaming I'm not doing right now. Sad, sad, sad.

But do not fret. The inspiration for a new series of features has gripped me, even in this comatose, homework-laden form. And it is good.

Reminiscing about Daytona was the spark. Then playing the original Castlevania with some starving artist pals of mine really got the old noodle whirring. See, as much as I pride myself with my fortress of PC knowledge, have I not been forsaking an important part of the industry by ignoring consoles in all shapes and forms? I would answer yes. And though my Wii teetered on the edge of being sold, the inevitable price drop by Nintendo came to pass, and so now the white little box is worth almost nothing. Our more homebrew savvy readers will understand where this thread of thought is leading, but suffice to say what I'm dreaming up may sound something like old console shemulators.

You know, Shmenegis, Shmintendo, Shmuper Shnen Shne Shes, Shmega Shmaster Shmystem. Why not delve back into the classics and write about them through the lens of a jaded PC wanker? And so that is the plan and it is dubbed "Re-console-iation" in a clever play on words that makes me happy inside. More to come soon-ish.

Rolllliiiing Staaaarrrt

2009-11-24T22:49:00.011-05:00

While I don't own any current generation consoles at this very moment, I did have a protracted love affair with industry hate-magnet, the Sega Saturn. As my parents decided for Christmas many years ago that the Saturn was the better deal versus Sony's offering, I missed out on the superior software library of the Playstation. Instead of Resident Evil and Twisted Metal, I had Virtual Cop, Nights, and, most importantly, Daytona USA.

I cite Daytona specifically because just hearing the ridiculously cheesy "Rolllllllliiiiiinnngggg Staaaaaaarrrrrt" and other music evokes memories of a wrapping paper strewn living room with the spiffy new Saturn sitting proudly on top of my parents' huge CRT television. And it was glorious. I had graduated from only having an 8-bit Sega Master System and an old Pentium 166 with to having real-time 3D graphics on a television screen. It felt like an impossible leap forward, something that I knew only a Christmas morning could bring. And though I would go on to bemoan the gift as a terrible mistake ("All the kids at school have a PLAYSTATION, DAD!"), I look back at it now and have nothing but fond memories of the thing- exactly what a Christmas gift is supposed to do for a kid.

So yes, while everyone is playing their barking dog Christmas music and decorating their houses in lights to get in the holiday spirit, I think I'm going to go dig my Saturn out and boot up Daytona.

-John

Oh-Ho! Security!

2009-11-21T20:16:00.007-05:00

The gall of some people. Lazily browsing through my Gmail the other night, I received a most peculiar letter from Blizzard's California-based Black Citadel. It read simply:

"Reason for Closure: Terms of Use Violation -- Exploitative Activity: Abuse of the Economy

This account was closed because one or more characters were identified exchanging, or contributing to the exchange of, in-game property (items or gold) for "real-world" currency. This exchange process negatively impacts the World of Warcraft game environment by detracting from the value of the in-game economy."

Now, I'm sure most people who receive this notice go: "My god, I just knew I shouldn't have bought $90 worth of gold with my mom's Visa card." But whereas I had unsubscribed from WoW something like two months ago, I was a little curious as to how Lightbane and his cadre of other characters I had created could be mucking about in their server's auction houses. So, because Blizzard gave me the friendly option to respond to the charges, I wrote back:

I unsubscribed from World of Warcraft almost two months ago, I'm not sure I understand how or why my account's been linked to economy exploitation when I haven't logged in on it in the time between when my account was frozen and when it was banned.

Please look into whether or not my account has been compromised, as I used my primary debit card to pay for my subscriptions.

Thank you in advance

This was met with an e-mail informing me that my appeal would investigated by an account specialist. Joy. Shortly after that message, I was greeted with a pre-emptively sent customer service survey. Curiouser and curiouser.

Finally, I received a message three days later informing me that yes, my account had been compromised, though my credit card information was safe. Included in this message was a list of items that had been restored to my characters, presumably because they had been sold by some jerk that had illegally acquired my login info. How he had in the first place is a mystery, because I'm horridly anal about my desktop's security. Nonetheless, Blizzard generated a new password for me and reimbursed me with a whole month of play time for free- not that I'll be using it, but the thought was nice.

So how to describe being violated by some rogue hacker? Considering that I wasn't religiously invested in Warcraft at the time, it was very "meh." Lightbane is my shining achievement of MMO-ness and, judging from his current Armory profile, that's not saying much. Still, I'm not terribly comfortable with the idea of some ill intending punk running around as my characters and trolling through my items and mail. And, if my memory serves me right, this is the first time it's happened in any game I even half care about.

The most surprising thing about the incident was the way in which Blizzard handled it: politely, relatively speedily, and wholly apologetic about my situation. In the face of other horror stories about hapless MMO users being victimized by both hackers and game companies, it was refreshing. The ordeal also serves as a sharp reminder of why Blizzard commands the MMO industry like Bioware does the western RPG genre ( HINT UPCOMING FEATURE HINT).

-John

Sunday Horrifics: Inaccurate Edition

2009-11-15T12:39:00.005-05:00

No, that is NOT how Raiders ended. More like:

There it is.

More Like "Braggin' Age," Amiright?

2009-11-05T10:54:00.011-05:00

I've tasted the sweet nectar of Dragon Age: Origins, and is it good. Unhealthily good. Stay up til' 4am, even though I have class at 9 good. The visuals, the crispness of character movement, the tactical view; Bioware has pulled out all stops in attempting to corner the market of basement dwelling no-lifes who've been pining for a "real" successor to Baldur's Gate. And Dragon Age is certainly that.

I've only spent four hours with it, but in that time I've seen identified so may things I love about the game that probably won't resonate with anyone else, I question my ability to fairly judge it. Take the tactical view and art style. It's a moderately conventional fantasy direction, but when you pull out to tactical view, the world is suddenly a living, breathing version of Baldur Gate 2's best hand drawn backgrounds. The first time I pulled out to tactical in the Chantry's tower, I quite literally stopped and balked at how downright nostalgic the whole thing felt. The targeting rings around the characters, their accompanying portraits, and the combat sounds combine to scream "TACTICAL PAUSE-O-RIFIC FANTASY ADVENTURE" in your face.

The writing and voice acting, similarly, are outstanding. I'm probably echoing a hundred or so reviews, but even the characters who you don't enter into selectable dialog with are well voiced. They don't even spout stupidly obvious things, like "Welcome to the chantry!" It's more like "I heard someone's been researching blood magic. Scary, no?" Relevant plot details being spouted by NPCs? Amazing. With quality like that present in such a minor game element, it's no surprise I'm finding myself enthralled whenever a main character opens his or her mouth. It's like watching some violently recut Lord of the Rings, but about eight-thousand times more engaging and awesome.

So yes, Dragon Age: Origins is shaping up to be unrealistically awesome and life ruining. I'm sure I'll find something to take issue with when I review it, but right now I'm on a nerdy honeymoon of possibly epic proportions.

-John

Arkham Asylum: The Gist of It

2009-11-04T20:13:00.006-05:00

Chalk up Arkham Asylum as the latest action/adventure title that I devoured in a couple days of sleepless playing and obsessive level retreading. For a man who prides himself in playing and beating utterly inaccessible titles in the vein of Dwarf Fortress and Rise of Nations (more on that in an upcoming piece), I'm curiously susceptible to "mindless" beat'em ups and games devoid of any RPG statistics at all. I should consider these kinds of things blemishes on my Nerd Respect License, but meh. An adventure is an adventure. All the better if it has a decent story to pursue.

First, my background on Batman. I'm not a comic kid, sadly, so those of you who are (I'm looking at you, Mr. Duquet), I apologize in advance. I know Batman through the award winning animated series on WB in the nineties. Embrassment aside, that works outs pretty well, because Mark Hammill and Kevin Conroy, who voice the Joker and Batman respectively, have been re-cast as the ever-battling duo in Arkham, to my grossly understated delight. Hammill emodies what, to me, the clown prince should sound like; completely irreverent, a little unstable, and maliciously sarcastic.

But enough exposition: brass tacks. Batman: Arkham Asylum is an action adventure game from Rocksteady Studios, who have produced absolutely nothing that I've ever been interested in before. Nonetheless, their latest offering is a VISCERAL, ROCK SOLID, action game that follows the bat-eared Dark Knight through a particularly rough night on the titular Arkham Island. See, the Joker's gone sprung a gigantic, purple and green colored trap on our cape-clad hero, wresting control of the entire island from its burly security staff. If you've ever seen episode 568 of the animated series, "The Trial," you'll know what's in store for Bats.

Right, so the game. Rocksteady has gone and crafted a kind of holy triad of gameplay that incorporates no holds barred brawling, predatory stealth, and light puzzle solving. Short of a few minors flaws in each, It works absolutely splendidly. The brawling is especially brutal looking, with Bruce Wayne busting out every brand of martial arts flavored ass kicking he's learned in his worldly training- all with a single button. The animations involved in said poundings are superb, with no one punch or kick animation being playing twice in succession, and Batman slickly darting to and from his enemies in a black colored whirlwind of hurt.

But if you know anything about Batman, you also know he's a thinking man's man, and an expertly trained shadow warrior. So in some encounters you're put up against a room of heavily armed thugs that can reduce your Bat-life bar to shreds in moments. Fine by Batman, as you have no shortage of ways to stealthily dispatch the clown-faced goons without so much as getting a bruise. If you want to cause a raucous amongst the brutes, string one up from a handily-placed gargoyle and watch the rest panic as they realize something is picking them off one by one. Alternately, you could use a sonic Batarang to attract the lot of them under a weakened ceiling, then use your Batsplosive gel to cause said ceiling to collapse on their heads. You're limited in your approach only your environment and twisted creativity.

The last glowing thing I have to say about the game before I get to sniping at it's (extremely minor) flaws is its collectible aspect. Holy goddamn is it good. I'm no devout Batman fan, but I'm a lore geek to the max, and Arkham Asylum has within it such a delectable spread of fan tributes, Easter eggs, and comic homages that I found myself constantly going to the DC Comics wiki just so I could appreciate what I was finding. Patient interview tapes, character art and biographies, and 3D models of nearly all the villains and allies in the game are all there for the taking, and you're welcome, even after the game's conclusion, to go back and comb through the whole of the island to find all of them. Never have I felt so rewarded for spending so much time in a game. Seriously, the mindless flag collecting in the first Assassins Creed was compelling, but Arkham Asylum redefines what collectibles should be in ALL games.

So with all the good expunged out of my body, let me turn to the nastier bits. As much as I love the concept of FreeFlow combat, and as good as it looks, I found it downright irritating. It's good enough for taking on two or three inmates at a time, but when the game starts to throw veritable hordes of henchmen at you, some wielding knives and stun batons that can't be directly beaten up, it becomes maddening. Yes, I get it, the Dark Knight can kick ass and take names, but for the love of god, why can't my counter button interrupt my Batjitsu fits so some goon doesn't slap me upside the head with a pipe?

As for the stealth segments, I found the enemy AI inconsistent in how it handled me. Sometimes I could literally run right behind a gun toting inmate at full speed and not have him even blink. Other times, I'd be crouched and hidden by a corner when someone would suddenly cry out "THERE'S THE BAT" and start to unload a twelve gauge shotgun into my face. These instances were far and few between, but could have been remedied by some kind of indicator about how well hidden Batman actually is.

Minor quibbles aside, Batman: Arkham Asylum shines as probably the first ever game to do the license justice, and it does so with a justice-fueled fury. A fury that could only have come from having its video game parents killed in a video game alley by a video game mugger after some video game jewelry and cash. And from that day forward, Batman: Arkham Asylym swore it would take vengeance on all other bad license video games. It would make them pay for getting consistently low Metacritic scores and cheapening the medium. But first, it would need a video game symbol. [This allegory went for several more paragraphs and contained sixty-one more instances of prefacing words with "video game." Snip. -Ed].

So, yes. Batman: Arkham Asylum is amazing. It looks awesome, has something for everyone, and is an easy contender for the second annual The Good, The Lame, and The Weaksauce awards for 2009. Here's to hoping Rocksteady can keep its steam up and deliver something similarly amazing to all its newly acquired fans in the future.

-John

Mickey the Badass

2009-11-04T19:42:00.004-05:00

I'm on the fence about Epic Mickey. On the one hand, as pointed out in the now-numerous interviews and impressions all over the interweb, this could finally be the game that see's Mickey become the adventurous hero he should be. On the other hand, licensed intellectual properties are licensed intellectual properties. And we all know those things can form awfully toxic concoctions.

Let's look at the worst case scenario. Firstly, this game is Wii-exclusive. Bad. Bad, bad, bad. Just that phrase, "Wii-exclusive," means to a lot of games journalists what "kind of racist" means to the mainstream media. Controller waggle, Gamecube-duct-tape graphics, kiddy stylings- it all shouts "DON'T TAKE THIS GAME SERIOUSLY!" very loudly. On top of it, all the impressions I've read seem to tout the originality of the game's setting, but not so much the uniqueness of the actual gameplay. And that could be because all people have to talk about is a twenty minute, non-interactive presentation. Go figure.

The argument for the best case scenario goes like this. Game design heart-throb, Warren Spector, is heading the project, flanked by the good people over at Junction Point Studios. Deus Ex, System Shock, Ultima Underword, these are the titles that speak to Spector's design philosophy, and it's the only reason you see geeked computer miscreants giving two damns about this title. So Epic Mickey, even it turns out to be the worst kind of license-exploit-ware, will have a pedigree. The second thing I'm smacking my gob over is the game's setting, as summarized in this New York Times article:

Epic Mickey, designed for Nintendo’s Wii console, is set in a “cartoon wasteland” where Disney’s forgotten and retired creations live. The chief inhabitant is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character Walt Disney created in 1927 as a precursor to Mickey but ultimately abandoned in a dispute with Universal Studios. In the game, Oswald has become bitter and jealous of Mickey’s popularity. The game also features a disemboweled, robotic Donald Duck and a “twisted, broken, dangerous” version of Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World.” Using paint and thinner thrown from a magic paintbrush, Mickey must stop the Phantom Blot overlord, gain the trust of Oswald and save the day.

Awesome. I'm an utter sucker for stories of failed dreams and hopeless, disillusioned characters. It's one of the many reasons I love a lot of the sub-stories written into the Venture Brothers. Honestly, this is the edgiest thing I've seen about the game (aside from the concept art that isn't entirely representative of the game, as we all now know). If Disney's willing to go as far admitting that, yes, the fates of all their unused characters really mattered to good ole' Walt, then maybe this title really has some kind of magical touch to it after all. Time will tell.

But for all the nerd love sugar I can pour on the concept of this game, my gut is telling me that we're going to see a middling, C+ averaging adventure platformer released next year. It'll be praised for its originality, story, and probably faithful depiction of old Mickey cartoons, but will be torn between its accessibility to tweens and its Spector-derived gameplay. So the great No Crisis Yet oracle has predicted, so shall it be!

-John

Halloween Horrifics: Aesop Rock's "Coffee"

2009-10-30T14:59:00.003-04:00

Happy Halloween, and all that nonsense.

I kid! This video is so epic in its display of classic pulp horror gore that not watching it on Halloween will result in Chris and I egging the hell out of your house dressed as matching PacMan ghosts.

-John

Titan Quest Impressions: Three Years On

2009-10-29T15:11:00.003-04:00

John: So Chris, remember how we both got that awesome Steam deal on that 3 year old Diablo II clone with rag doll physics?

Chris: Not exactly. I remember being about 20 minutes too late for the deal, although that didn't stop me from purchasing the game.

John: At $20. For a Diablo II clone. With rag doll physics.

Chris: Yeah. I already spent about 10 hours getting into the game, although I'm not even close to passing the first act. I remember getting owned by some half horse half asshole creature men.

John: Those things suck. And the boss one blows a massive horn to summon more half horse half asshole creature men. What a bastard. See, that's where I'm not sure about this game. I mean we get skills, we get character attributes, but we have to chug potions to barely survive angry centaurs. Is that bad design? I forget if I had to do that in D2.

Chris: It's not really bad design. I remember doing that constantly in Diablo II. See, you're always playing a squishy caster character. That being said, you never really rush yourself into combat head on expecting to swing your way and get hit. For me, this is pretty close to how I play Diablo II. I always had fun creating characters that break the laws of the game and go melee. Why? Because I like getting personal with it.

Also, in Titan Quest you have less of a viewing area. Monsters actually happen to have a much greater one than you character. So you're more prone to be attacked than to attack first. That may be why you're using your pots more often than you expect to.

John: It's true. I love playing delicate, almost china doll like caster characters. But I mean, I made a Templar too. And he's supposed to be a badass, shield using damage sponge. And a boss killer. And so far, he's more like a red potion chugging sissy with a flying pet eyeball. At least in D2, if I had a defense oriented Barbarian, that dude just let loose, charged, combat leapt, and generally tore shit up without consequence. In comparison, my Titan Quest characters feel like fragile glass children. With asthma.

Chris: You're not hardcore enough.

John: Chris, I just beat Baldur's Gate on hardcore. Through sheer force of will, several boxes of Cheez-Its, and maybe the sacrifice of a small household pet, I overcame. I'm the DEFINITION of hardcore.

Chris: Calm down. Don't take that 2nd Edition AD&D elitist tone with me.

I found Diablo II busted in a lot of ways that Titan Quest isn't. For instance, why is it you can still make an awesome class without actually ever investing a single point into your intellect? Where you're expected to use mana all the time. Older players of the game just so happen to have items already lined up for their other character where they never run out of mana just because of the fact they have such a great amount by what they wear.

John: I hated the D2 guides that were like "Yeah, don't worry about building this character logically because you're a rich trade baron with access to high runes and any item you want. Mostly because you run Meph bots."

Fuck you, GameFAQs guide writers.

Chris: So we've come to the consensus that both games are broken in some way.

John: Yeah, Titan Quest has its own batch of problems. Not necessarily all of D2's flaws, but still. I want to get items to help my character, not build my character around items I MIGHT get my hands on.

Chris: Diablo II has its own economy, whereas Titan Quest doesn't have the players or the chat channels to warrant one. If you can go back to the first time you ever logged onto Bnet you should remember that when you start with nothing. Its a hard time. You get happy by the first unique you find and then you try trading it up somehow for your own class. In Titan Quest, you don't have the same amount of background of all the in game items.

John: Titan Quest is more Diablo 1-ish, what with all the character hacking apps and single-player-to-multiplayer character swapping. That brings me back. Godly Plate of the Whale, how I miss you.

Chris: I agree with the Diablo 1 feel. The way that the game is constructed is just very flat in general in the fact how they didn't try to restrain you. Diablo II every class has its own abilities.

In Titan Quest and Diablo 1, every character is able to access all skills that they want to. Diablo 1 allows infiniate of whatever-the-heck-you-wants-as-long-as-you-find-the-books. Titan Quest allows skill allocations like Diablo 2, but you're allowed to mix up your combat however you like.

John: The skill selection is nice, but the whole "Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity" mechanic rains on that parade a bit. As is historically accepted, hybrid characters get shat on.

But I've had a year or two of this game under my belt. Give me a new perspective, something juicy to close this piece with.

Chris: In all honesty, I find the game to be fun at times, but it feels like I'm drudging through the mud in thought. I look forward to playing it when I have nothing to do, but, in being away from it, I want to complain about it.

On the other hand, Titan Quest seems to have a lot of fun aspects to it. I wish there were small tweaks made to it so that it wouldn't have the complaints I have about it right now. I also wish I wasn't trying to take something out of it. I should just be focusing on gameplay and not giving a damn about storyline, but for some reason I'm paying attention to the plot and, for me, Greek Mythology is a bit boring the 20th time around.

John: Astute observations all around, sir.

Game Design for Journalists

2009-10-24T13:42:00.007-04:00

Jeff Green has a fascinating post over at his personal blog, where he describes the uncomfortable transformation of game journalist to game developer. Since his departure from Computer Gaming World (or Games for Windows Magazine, as it was known towards the end of its life), Green has been working on Wii-only Sims games for EA. And while everyone who reads that should shudder and ask themselves "Really?", Green approached his new career with open arms and optimism. From the sounds of his post, that may not have been enough:

"In 12 months, I was on 4 different teams and 6 different games. I went from producer to designer to producer. Despite 13 years as the editor of a PC gaming magazine, I ended up on Wii-only games. These aren't complaints, by the way, just the way it was. In all honesty, I had a (mostly) great time, and learned so goddamn much. My perspective was completely upended and enlightened. It's an experience that *every* game journalist ought to go through, at least temporarily, George Plimpton style, just to learn what the hell these people do all day."

I'm eagerly awaiting further installments of his tell-all story.

-John Lynch

The Other Worldly Me

2009-10-22T14:04:00.003-04:00

I had an hour or so to dick around with Dragon Age's kind-of-recently-released character creator last week, but in that time I think I managed to create a pretty good likeness of myself. This is the realization of a horrifying kind of nerd fantasy:

OH GOD, BURN IT! BURN IT!

-John

Utter Drought

2009-10-21T17:57:00.004-04:00

It has been over 72 hours since I last played a single video game. I'm not taking into account the three minutes I spent gawking at the Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising menu and musing over its slickness. No, that's not gaming at all. But, much to my girlfriend's delight, the amount of schoolwork I've gotten done in the time I usually reserve for trudging through old RPGs has gotten me AHEAD of my workload for the semester. Unthinkable.

If anything, this serves as a lesson to those who, like me, utilize the medium as an escape, a departure from the workload. But seriously, who knew all the nagging mothers of the world were right? In order to stymie their efforts, I'm going to rephrase this entire post:

I didn't stop playing games; I just started a new one. Based in reality. And it's called "Homework: The Researching." In it, you play a twenty-something college student who must turn in assignments periodically in order to keep his score (or GPA) up. The less assignments your character turns in, the lower his GPA dips, and the less financial aid he receives. There are unique power ups available to your character, ranging from the relatively harmless "Coffee," which grants you a few points of perception for a short time, to "Adderall," a drug that enhances your work ethic at the cost of your character's will to live.

Yeah, that's as far as I'll take this lame joke. Just know that if you're reading this and still have capacity to play games without endangering your academic future, you should probably play an extra hour for me. You know, so I can kind of, somehow live vicariously through you.

Actually, just comment on this thread and tell me what you've been playing this week. That'll make me feel like I'm not missing anything at all.

Not. At. All.

-John

Big Translation Error

2009-10-20T11:52:00.010-04:00

All bears made equal...

Today there was an article posted up at the Telegraph website on the idea of creationism and how Hebrew Bible may have been mistranslated. What one academic is claiming is that Earth existed before creation. Saying that a higher power did not create heaven or Earth. Instead he simply separated us from it.

How does this pertain to the site?

It opens up the small minded views a little bit more on creation. For instance, we are sure that the Protoss and Zerg were made, now we may have more than enough of an argument stating that the Xel'Naga could have created Terran-kind. Or better yet, did another race?

~Chris

Sunday Horrifics: Trick r' Treat

2009-10-18T17:03:00.003-04:00

If I have to give and award to this movie for anything, I'd give it the "Most Recent Movie to Have a Ton of Children Disemboweled Award." Be it bus zombies or razor blades, this movie has no shortage of costume-clad children being brutalized at the hands of an unforgiving Halloween.

-John

Crashing the Gate: Part 3

2009-10-15T10:46:00.005-04:00

The mighty struggle is over. Saverok, the ascendant god of murder and half-brother of my character, lies beneath the mighty boot heel of my party. In the short time leading up to his defeat, he almost triggered a catastrophic war between Amn and Baldur's Gate, killed my character's step father, and greatly pissed me off by making me navigate a stupidly generic wood-paneled maze. With stupid traps. And stupid, magic-immune skeletons. Did his evil know no bounds?

The finale of Baldur's Gate is bittersweet. On one hand, the build up to finally confronting Saverok at his inauguration was epic. I loved that he made an effort to infiltrate the legitimate leadership of Baldur's Gate (the city, mind you) through subterfuge, intimidation, and scare tactics. I loves me cutthroat political tactics. I also liked the characters introduced upon entering the game's namesake city. Scar, the badass second-in-command to the Flaming Fists reminded me of a hardboiled detective out of a pulp novel- gruff, mean, but dedicated to his job. It made his assassination that much more poignant. That's the sweet of it. The bitter, much like the devil, is in the gameplay details.

It seems at a certain point in the game, maybe near Chapter five or six, Bioware sat down their designers and said "Guys, these enemies just aren't cutting it. They need to hit harder, faster, and be impervious to damage. THAT'S Dungeons and Dragons!" And so from chapter six onwards, every goddamn enemy of importance is magically blurred (harder to hit), magically hasted (gets like 4 attacks in a round), and has some kind of accuracy buff that lets them roll 1 on a twenty sided die and still bust through my +1 platemail. And it's annoying. Really annoying. Especially since I felt my party was finally hitting their stride. They had some of the best spells in the game scribed in their mage books, their armor classes were more or less in the negatives, and they were rocking weapons named after deeds of badassery. What gave?

Turns out, my level.

I finished the game with a mostly-level-5 party. After reading some guides and starting a Baldur's Gate II game, I see how insane that is. I probably should have held off foiling Saverok's devious machinations for another two levels or so. You know, when my casters could actually cast those spells they had scribed in their spell books (I never got to try dimension door. Sad face). But what ended up happening was that I got funneled into completing the story quests too quickly. At a certain point in the game you can no longer just waltz around Baldur's Gate as you please; Flaming Fist police forces show up and start to hassle the shit out of you, namely because you're branded a villain. Now this wouldn't be a problem, except that killing one of these guys results in a sizable drop in your reputation- unacceptable for my Lawful Good aligned character. And so I had to take after a fleeing Saverok in order to end it all, which brings me to my next bitter point.

The last thing I planned on encountering when I was sent to track down and kill Saverok after crashing his inauguration party was some bland, shitty, boring, lamely designed maze. Seriously, look at the thing:

Does that say "epic chase sequence" to you, Bioware? Do you think I want to waste time plodding through some stupid copy of a Highlights for Kids puzzle? Hell no. Especially not after experiencing the amazing climax of Mass Effect, wherein Shepard PUNCHES OUT OF A GLASS ELEVATOR AND RUNS IN ZERO GRAVITY TOWARDS A GIGANTIC EVIL, SENTIENT SHIP. Damn it. But that just goes to show how far Bioware has come regarding game design. And judging from that title, I can only have lame nerd dreams as to how insanely epic the ending to Dragon Age is going to be- but that's another post entirely.

So was taking the thirty some-odd hours out of my life to beat the archaic PC gaming relic worth it? In short, abso-goddamn-lutely. Hell, I'm already rolling up characters for another, more-efficient play-through. But besides my personal fun playing through this game, I achieved exactly what I wanted: greater insight into the ancestry of Bioware's expansive titles by playing their earlier works. It's eerie playing something like Mass Effect and noticing how the conversations, tongue-in-cheek situations, and pause-and-plan combat mirror what was established in Baldur's Gate. Ditto for Planescape and Neverwinter Nights. The resemblance is uncanny, and I like that I can finally see just how pronounced it is.

What bodes next for me? Welp, Dragon Age comes out Nov. 2. I'd have roughly 17 days to play through another Bioware title before starting on the no-doubt-massive and soul consuming RPG epic. I've already reinstalled Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate 2. Whether or not it's worth it to beat either of them in a timely fashion (especially what with frenzied school work I'm barely turning in) is something I'll have to decide in the next day or two. Rest assured that if I undertake another game beating challenge, I'll post my struggle with it here.

-John

Crashing the Gate: Part 2

2009-10-08T23:15:00.006-04:00

It happened. A breakthrough of such far reaching consequence that the entire country - the world - should be notified through every possible form of media. 4 days after my third yearly attempt, the impossible became reality:

I am horridly addicted to Baldur's Gate.

And not only am I addicted, but I've gotten farther than I ever have before, actually reaching the inner walls of the game's namesake city. And it's marvelous. Wholly stunning, tactically engaging, and above all, maddeningly hard to stop playing. Every attempt to quit out of the game is usually stymied by a "Well, I should really just check out the next area" reservation. I haven't consistently woken up so bleary eyed since my irresponsible bout of Fallout 3 binging; and it's damn good to feel so compelled to play a single player PC game again.

"But," screams a hate mongering reader, "did you not liken playing the game to brushing your teeth with motor oil and sand paper not four days ago!? You flip flopping cad!" And to this I reply "Meh. I hated Fallout 2 when I first played it. I just got that game quicker because it had fade-to-black sex and guns." Seriously, the high fantasy motif, rigid adherence to AD&D rules, and slow-to-start plot formed a very heavy duty entry to gameplay for me. I guess it took three years of chipping away at it to finally collapse the damn thing.

So what specifically do I like about Baldur's Gate? The plot for one- once it finally wakes up around Chapter 4, that is. Political strife and manipulation combined with stopping the ascension of a murder-obsessed god always makes for good fantasy fodder, especially when you finally start to feel like you're putting some distance between yourself and the wimpy, green-robe clad loser you started as. There's no denying the sense of achievement to be had when you start to notice just how much gear you're wearing has a specific name and history associated with it, or that people are seeking you out because they know you can get shit done.

I'm still not too crazy about the fights. Even twenty or so hours in, I'm finding myself constantly reloading my game to replay a battle so as to not lose a party member. And some of the tactics I've had to fall back to don't seem very epic. One fight in particular has you ascend to the top floor of a merchant cartel's tower only to be stuck behind a staircase while three mages drop spells on your head and you're bum rushed by a doppleganger. I ended up having my stealth-inclined ranger ascend to the top floor alone and pick off the mages one by one by exploiting the AIs weakness with fog of war. While admittedly cool, it felt a little too much like power gaming than proper fantasy tactical combat. In short, it felt like WoW. Even so, when fights go well, they do splendidly, and every one feels like a notch on my character's Belt of Piercing.

Another facet of gameplay that I never really got to experience on my previous attempts to beat the game is the free roaming aspect. Prior to this attempt, I felt that Baldur's Gate was a strictly linear experience, with the world map functioning as a kind of hallway through which to move. Not so. Upon finding Minsc and rescuing his beloved witch, I found that I could go to practically any zone I wanted and just explore. It was a brilliant sensation, as if I had been playing a tutorial the whole time and had finally just gotten into the real game. Really, most of my twenty plus hour game time has been dedicated to scouring each zone for scripted events, random dungeons, and loot. The experience smacks of my early romps through Everquest and Fallout, when I was just a hopeless noob probing the vast, unknown world around me.

But my quest is still not over and I don't know what lies at the end of this high fantasy epic. I know I will beat Baldur's Gate, but what will I think of the whole package? Stay tuned for the finale of this series.

Continues in Part III

-John

Packing a Paunch

2009-10-08T10:18:00.002-04:00

Is this Max Payne 3 trailer legit? All signs point to maybe, as the clip's tumultuous history is outlined by Joystiq.

Regardless, how cool does Payne look without hair?

-John

Bloodily Simple

2009-10-05T23:41:00.006-04:00

You wouldn't know it by the decided lack of my interview with Tarn Adams, but I love getting into the head of developers behind games. Adore it. I also love when Marilyn Manson loving marketing departments tone down their dependence on appealing to the base urges of fifteen-year-olds with buckets of blood, sex, and liquid testosterone.

The above trailer for Dragon Age: Origins is the best of both worlds. Not only do you get a rare look at how the team used the original Neverwinter Nights engine to block out some of Dragon Age's areas, but you get a healthy dose of art direction commentary- the lifeblood of forum crawling lowlifes who need something to complain about. All without being book-ended by terrible, terrible, terrible music! Well done, Bioware, well done.

-John

Get Pumped!

2009-10-05T04:06:00.005-04:00

Something in me really, really loved Runman: Race Around the World when I first saw the above trailer. The quirky Cracker Barrel music, MS Paint sprites, and the goofy smiles on the background scenery combined to draw out from me a minute long, child-on-Christmas-morning euphoria. And it was amazing.

So amazing that I went right over to Tom Sennet's site and gave that guy $5 for his work of art. If not for the actual game itself, then just for the sheer joy that the initial trailer gave me. Of course, now that the rush is over, what am I left with?

It turns out, a really, really cute and funny Sonic-lite experience filled to the brim with kindergarten charm and bubbly irreverence that pervades everything. Hell, the initial loading screen looks like this:

If RunMan's adorable form spouting "Get pumped" doesn't make some microfiber of you go "Aw" in a downward inflection, then you might be at risk of having no soul.

Anyways, for those of you who are intent on destroying the indy scene with your lack of cyber monies, you too can still enjoy the full game for completely free. Just know that you're breaking Tom Sennett's heart and probably hurting the entire world, you selfish jerk.

-John

Sunday Horrifics

2009-10-04T12:41:00.003-04:00

There are a lot of good things about Killer Klowns From Outer Space. Take the original rock song treatment of the movie's title. It's a rocking punk ballad featuring the following lyrics:

some make us laugh some make us cry
these klowns honey gonna make you die
everybodys running when the circus comes into their town
everybodys gunning for the likes of the killer klowns
from outer space...
Touching, really. And I'm not even going to mention the cotton candy cocoons, the popcorn guns, and the clown-on-ice-cream-man foursome that happens in a ball pit jacuzzi. Classic cinema at its peak.

-John

Crashing the Gate

2009-10-03T16:21:00.007-04:00

It's fall, and amidst the changing of leaves and the putting up of oddly shaped inflatable Halloween decorations comes another annual ritual of seasonal torture: my struggle to beat the first Baldur's Gate. Out comes the triple panel, five disc sleeve, the terribly written FAQs, and the needlessly detailed Gamespot guide. "Here we go," I say with the optimism of an inspired eight-year-old, "this is the final attempt."

And not four hours later, after my burly fighter and his party are torn apart by goddamn kobold arrows in the samey-rendered mines of Nashkel, do I slam my fist desk-ward and proclaim "Fuck this game."

Really, I feel like the people who can go back and play BG1 to completion are the same kinds of people who'd insist that their medical surgeries be carried out with rusty implements and no sedation because quote: "It's hardcore." Well, much like that course of action might not make for the most effective surgeries, so I will argue that Baldur's Gate isn't a great gaming experience in the modern gaming climate. I will do this using three specific illustrations.

My first task in the game is to get to the Friendly Arms Inn, where two additional party members and a night's rest await me. I barely managed to guide my duo of level one characters to said inn. But right outside the place is an assassin mage that will always target my character and can kill him (causing an effective Game Over) with a single casting of magic missile. Huh. Not a game-stopper, as I eventually melt his face off with a few well placed charges of Imoen's magic missle wand, but still, were Bioware's testers at the time really pleased by having their party ripped up by some innocuous looking dork in a robe?

Time spent beating this challenge: 20 minutes in something like six or seven attempts.

Most similar to: Brushing teeth with sand paper and motor oil

Well, my patience and persistence saw me gain entry to the inn, and things seemingly picked up from there. I got a cowardly fighter and a decent looking druid to join my party. The druid insisted that we go to the Nashkel mines some ways south and I was more than happy to oblige her request. No sooner than I depart Beregost to travel south are we waylaid by a bunch of angry hobgoblins with longbows. I had to reload a few times until I eventually emerged victorious, and even then, my party was left grievously wounded. Fine, we'll rest to restore my druid's healing spells. Haha, just kidding, John. You can't camp because more Hobgoblins found your camp and ambushed you! Miraculously, I fight these buggers off in a single attempt. I decide to retreat to an Inn to get proper rest only to be AMBUSHED BY A GAGGLE OF SKELETONS AND GHOULS THAT DISPATCH MY PARTY IN SECONDS. What an innovative gameplay mechanic!

Time spent stuck in this loop of travel ambush deaths: an hour

Most similar to: debating an HIV-existence-denying young earth creationist

So after a near endless loop of Ambush-Death-Load Game, I make it to Nashkel. Now I can finally get to the bottom of this tainted iron business! In tow are an impressive five characters in addition to my much-loved fighter. We should be able to tackle any sizable threats at this point. I locate the mines and ask the foreman if my brave party and I are able to assist him with his problem. Well, he throws a fit at me about my offered assistance and gives me a single day to remedy the situation. At last, a single NPC that compels me to finish the game! I lead my party into the mines, and as they round a corner, the stock combat music ramps up and in a single volley of presumably wimpy sized arrows, I lose my druid, thief, and bard to kobold longbow fire. Desk slamming ensues and I write this article.

Time spent surmounting kobold threat: Undetermined.

Most like: Playing a terrible antique of a game that is a tremendous waste of time to anyone but the hardest of hardcore dungeons and dragons players.

Continues in Part II.

-John

Sunday Horrifics: Mega Poo and Fans

2009-09-27T00:37:00.001-04:00

How, exactly, could I not post this?

-John

Mass Effect Was Pretty Great

2009-09-24T12:33:00.001-04:00

Pretty great is really a kind of title cop out. As in you, the RPG playing reader, should immediately be assaulted with the thought of: "Really, Mr. Lynch? Pretty great? How about really goddamn great. How about stupendously great? Show some concision!" And to you, reader, I say: "Fine you thankless husk of a human being, it was an exercise in cinematic-level space opera greatness, and I got to let a xenophobic, unattractive, butchy space bitch die at the hands of an improvised nuke. Riveting."

And so I did. Nothing gave me more pleasure in the entire game than to make the decision to leave behind that whiny, racist, wholly off putting woman. Well, besides forcing a certain character to shoot himself in the head instead of fighting me. Games that allow me that kind of control over one of the final boss battles go to a special kind of game heaven when they die- infinitely lasting, fan obsessed game heaven (think Fallout and Planescape).

But to be honest, I can't be sure if it was Mass Effect's compelling narrative structure that got me to finally finish the game, or the over dosage of NyQuil I gave myself to stave off a terrible cold. Being buzzed off your ass on any kind of disassociatve psychedelic can make a man do anything. Admittedly, the game got infinitely more accessible when I finally cleared out my burgeoning, menu navigated inventory full of useless weapon mods and worthless, eight credit armors. So too did it get easier when I decided to stick with Wrex and Garrus as my alien A-Team, as opposed to the constant bench swapping I had been engaged in for the first third of the game.

Still, I was really, really caught up in the final hour of the game. For all the internal bitching I was doing about cliche space opera gimmicks, I was hopelessly caught up in the game's riveting finale- the swelling, epic orchestral arrangement, the gigantic set pieces, the gravity of having the fate of billions and billions of lives depending on your hopefully heroic actions- it's enough to make anyone's inner geek possess and force them to grip the mouse and keyboard with an ungodly nerdy fervor.

I'm relieved that Mass Effect wasn't as much of a KOTOR clone as I figured it would be late in the game, which is a bad and good thing. Bad in that I couldn't enslave the whole of the galaxy under my twisted whims when the game's conclusion was upon me, good that the combat never devolved into spamming light saber power attacks over and over again on endless, samey looking Sith troopers.

The question I'm batting around in my head now is how much Mass Effect's gameplay style reflects what Bioware is doing with Dragon Age Origins. Combat is obviously going to be handled radically differently, or at least that's the impression I'm under after sitting through the numerous gameplay demo videos and reading hands on impressions. But the story structure, the idea of really pivotal plot points and multiple outcomes for side quests, unique quests given by your companions- it's all really great stuff. At its height, Mass Effect brought me right back to the countless hours guiding the Nameless One and his cursed ocompanions around Sigil. Very Exciting stuff.

Will I play through Mass Effect again as an uber leveled biotics user? I think so. I admittedly rushed through the last seven our so hours of the game, skipping a multitude of the game's more involved side missions. That's damning heresy coming from a self admitted masochistic completist. And can I really just let my immense credibility as such a loser go and get tarnished? No. Never.

-John

Sunday Horrifics: Ballad of Buzzed Lightyear

2009-09-20T12:12:00.004-04:00

"Time isn't wasted when you're gettin' wasted."
-Asher Roth

Yo Mikey,

Listen, last night was CRAZY, dog. Sully, Nicky, and me woke up today and couldn't remember where we parked Nicky's Jetta, but that mousy chick that works the check in desk told us it was somewhere in E lot. CRAZY, DOG!1

Anyway, bro, I don't remember a lot about last night (WIKKED GOOD TIME) but do you remember the guy who showed up dressed like Buzz Lightyear? He came in with an Igloo cooler half full of empties and opened Papst Blue Ribbons and a boom box that just kept looping Asher Roth's "I Love College". He kinda smelled like Scope mouth wash and wet weed. I'm not complaining, bro (I LOOOVE Asher Roth), but things got a little weird.

Like, he kept trying to duct tape Olde English 40s to people's hands and screaming "BUT I'M BUZZED LIGHTYEAR!" when people refused. What's up with that, bro? We just wanted to chill. It got worse when Sully went to use the bathroom, but Buzzed was in there washing his armpits out with hand soap. Yo man, time and place 4 everything, right?

The worst was when I was trying to get with Sheila, man. Me and her was just trying to make out on the deck when Buzzed came out and tried to bum smokes off me. I gave him my whole pack of reds, dog, but he just stood behind me and started crying. He was all like "This is the most kindness anyone has ever shown me since my mother passed last month and I really loved her, and now I'm thirty and I don't know how to take this costume off, I hope the campus police don't find me." Damn dog, that's serious cock-blockage, yo.

Yo, I gotta go cause me and the brothers is going to fondle each- I MEAN PLAY SOME MADDEN, DOG. MADDEN IS REALLY GREAT. I'll see you tonight at the 80s party, yo.

-Jonny

Make Me Care: Digital D&D

2009-09-16T20:29:00.007-04:00

As I hop off the Warcraft treadmill and politely towel off my geek sweat in anticipation for the fall semester, my attention turns towards finding some kind of single player distraction that won't cut into my study time. I have a number of choices before me.

I could buy the excellently priced Civilization IV pack off Steam and spend night after night trying to dominate the known world through superior culture and cutthroat corporate tactics. I could get around to beating Braid, which I bought this weekend for the pittance of $5. Arkham Asylum demands to be played (as I write this, Chris is surely playing the ever loving hell out of the challenge modes). Really, though, I'm looking for a single player RPG to fill the gaping item acquisition/character leveling void left by WoW. Preferably, something with a compelling narrative. And for something like that, I need to set my sites on a Dungeons and Dragons based game.

The pickings are slim. I've played Planescape: Torment to death (no pun inended), the first Baldur's Gate and I are having relationship problems, and the Witcher just can't seem to get its hooks into me. This leaves me with the meh-looking first Neverwiner Nights and its expansions, which I own, and its slightly more attractive but bug ridden descendant, Neverwinter Nights 2. I guess I could purse the newly de-subscriptioned Dungeons and Dragons Online, but the last thing I'd like to do right now is deal with learning the arcane social mechanics of an unfamiliar MMOG.

The most off-putting thing about the above games for me is their basis on existing pen and paper rules. I hate forcing my party to rest because my spell slinging sorcerer has expended his prepared spells for the day. Utterly hate it.

Similarly, (and maybe this is the WoW player in me talking) I hate the rate of character progression in d20 games. Planescape was tolerable because of the sheer amount of non-combat quests and activities you could engage in: convincing your party members to care about a tree so it would grow, breaking the curse on a wretched, homeless storyteller, etc. Leveling up came second to personal growth. During my time with the first Neverwinter Nights, though, I constantly found myself shoehorned into combat scenarios that put more emphasis on my character's stats rather than my personal choices. That just doesn't seem very RPGish to me, in the non-hack-and-slash sense.

But Dragon Age Origins is on the horizon. And if anything is going to get me in the mood to play the hell out of one more fantasy epic, it's going to be a DnD based Obsidian/Bioware game. So I think I'll consign myself to having a round with Neverwinter Nights 2. Whether or not it'll be as finicky to me as its great-grandfather, Baldur's Gate, will determine if the $20 or so dollars I'll spend on the digital download will be worth it. Here's to hoping I roll a natural 20 on my save versus d20 mechanics and yet another game set in the Forgotten Realms.

-John

Street Fighter: The Tabletop RPG

2009-09-10T14:50:00.003-04:00

Like Street Fighter? Like clever writing? Good. Then head over to Something Awful and examine drink the the pure outrageousness of their picture-by-picture take of the White Wolf Street Fighter RPG.

[Something Awful]

-John

2009-09-10T10:58:00.003-04:00

I'd say its lonely here, buried under metric shit-tons of schoolwork, but I've the luxury of being trapped with other survivors.

Let's cut the foreplay.

I know you want features. Good ones. Interesting ones. And I'm working on it. The super high quality interview with a certain lone wolf, dwarf creating indie developer is coming, rest assured. But my efforts to feed the NCY content pipeline has been inundated by, in no particular order, my schoolwork, a shake up in my personal life, and the inability to play anything interesting. It's a very inhospitable environment for prospective games journos.

But fear not, I say. Changes here at the Crisis offices are coming. Order will be restored and the cobwebs will be swabbed from the rafters of this wretched post graveyard. This I assert.

-John