May 2006 Archives

Fair enough. A bit harsh for my tastes, not as cute as best befits an Animal Crossing character. Perhaps Gaily of Rivendal has had a vision of the Next Gen Animal Crossing?

Yakobi of Kyoto gives us a servicable Pikachu. I say "serviceable" because the nose and mouth are too low. Other than that, perfect colors and nice eye-to-cheek ratio. There's even a discernible tongue!

Whuh-ho! That, friends, is Majora's Mask! That took some time to put together... and here I am about to bitch about the centering being off. Looked hilarious on Blanca's face.

But Josh? Your town name totally sucks.

An obviously freehand piece by Fropi of Frotopia. It reminds me of the last season of Sealab: all the proper elements are there, you just don't know why nothing works anymore.

Cierra of Bamville, you are just too darn cute.

This Blanca seems startled. I'm not sure why the face leans off to the right like that. Only Owen of WindTown could tell us, and he probably stopped playing the game three months ago.

Why is it that the prettiest names all take the time to make pretty little Blancas? Nice chibi work from Sakura of Konoha.

Here's the capper: Blanca, Hamtaro-style! Complete saturated cuteness, easily merchandisable and readily embraceable. Had I not wiped the Ham-Ham off this face, she probably would have spent the day counting walnuts, picking flowers and making friends wherever she went. A++ for Zak of Cedar.

I wrapped up Metal Gear Solid 3 a couple weekends ago, and it was just as pleasant as expected. It is much more action movie-esque than Sons of Liberty, and it features Snake all the way through. So if you're one of those dogmatic trolls who is still pissed about the big Raiden switch, I suggest you go fetch MGS3 right away.

Here's my endgame stats for MGS3:

"Shark" is probably just a mistranslation of "Suck." I mean, look at that. I bled 65 life bars' worth of damage and had to continue 44 times. I believe "seriously injured" means every wound I had to fix with field surgery... it's hard to imagine I applied that much disinfectant.

One of the bonus features on the Subsistence package is the original Metal Gear game, which I bravely tackled this past weekend. Cool world; it has stats as well.

I killed more people in the 1987 Metal Gear than I did in the 2004 Metal Gear. That's hilarious. And in a far shorter time!

You don't have to go to far to find somebody who enjoys screaming about how great video games used to be, how they're too easy these days, too story-driven, too derivative. Well, after having sampled the classics of yesteryear - Metal Gear, Metroid, Legend of Zelda - I think that's an awfully rosey worldview. Yes, they were more difficult, but only because of bad design, not because of any amazing forgotten gameplay secrets. Here's what leads me to say that: when you get lost in these games, you get lost. Especially in the original Metroid, which is absolutely tedious without any kind of in-game mapping or quest directory. And in Metal Gear, there are several times where some POW's random two sentence conversation will be your only clue as to where you should head next. Click too fast and you'll never see it again. Or, more egregiously, several doors can only be unlocked by radioing one of your buddies. So with eight keycards (none of which visually indicate the type of door they open, by the way) and the radio frequency, that's a lot of time cycling through your inventory trying to walk through a damn door.

I don't mean this as a derogatory complaint, however. "State of the Art" is always changing. Game designers learned that Games Without Maps Suck, and Games With No Second Chances Suck. At the time, the exploration and plot and domino-style fetch-questing was pretty mind-blowing... given that we're weren't even ten years away from Space Invaders yet. It's just that raising retro games above modern games is like raising silent movies over modern cinema. Both sides have their own unique charms.

That said, the original Metal Gear contains a surprising amount of elements that have survived into the current iterations. My intro to the series was Sons of Liberty (followed by Twin Snakes, and now Snake Eater), so it was great to see the little 8 bit germ that grew into those verifiable classics. Hiding in a box, radio-controlled missiles, the CODEC, the final bit of plot that rolls after the credits finish... all debuted in 1987. There's even some similar art direction in the landscapes, which floored me when I recognized it. (In fact, that might be a clue into the virtual fakery plotline of Sons of Liberty... the rooftops in Metal Gear 1 have the same color and features as the rooftops of the Big Shell in MGS2.) I honestly had no idea that Kojima's modern masterpieces were so connected to their lo-fi progenitors.

I've been kinda quiet lately, mainly due to the ailing iMac issue. I've used Rhonda's iBook for some general fourhman.com stuff in the meantime, but I'm not really very accustomed to laptops. So, almost a month later, my home office is finally back in business with the acquisition of a brand new iMac.

The transfer from old, awesome lamp iMac to new, less-interesting big flat media center iMac was smoother than expected. If you'll recall, the Apple Store jerks told me that my old iMac was beyond repair and they did not suggest doing a data transfer with it. And even though I repeatedly said that it still booted up in firewire mode every time, I was lectured about not keeping backups and was handed the business cards of several reputable data recovery services. Well, New iMac slurped up everything I needed from Old iMac. I even did the transfer in the middle of a thunderstorm. So suck it.

Took an hour, but I had it bring over ALL the documents as well as settings and user profile junk. But what was super is that, after the slurp, Newie came right up just like my old machine. Didn't have to re-enter any internet/email information (which is great, because I forget what all that was), the new iLife apps hungrily accepted all my existing bookmarks, music and photos (just had to authorize the new machine to play the purchased songs... so I guess I should try to find a way to de-authorize the old iMac), and Mail showed up with a month's worth of unread messages. It even remembered that I had turned on Safari's debug menu, because I'm a geek like that.

Had to re-download Adobe Reader, PageSpinner and Fetch. Aside from InDesign and Photoshop, I'm back up to normal operating strength. Those two biggies will come later. Even though Fetch was a fresh install, it picked up my fourhman.com FTP settings from the previous version... which is something else I no longer remember, so yay.

First impression of the Intel iMac: What the fuck is that white-text-on-black-screen shit that briefly shows on startup, before the happy refreshing Mac GUI takes over? That shit can stop right now.

Don't really like the Mighty Mouse. I have an excellent ergonomic reason, too. I naturally grip mice lower than what Apple's studies must suggest. So the nifty side buttons are a full inch above my thumb. And because my index/middle fingers therefore also sit lower, the non-button buttons of the Mighty Mouse don't always track as I expect them to. I'm debating: either I re-train my paws, or I plug in the old mouse.

I like the top-mounted iSight. Which, as I said from day one, just proves that Apple has no other use for a camera than video conferencing... no webcam, no video capture, nothing that would benefit from having a damn camera that you can tilt and position appropriately. And after noting that this built-in iSight fits into a case the width of my thumb, I have to wonder just what the heck is inside that gun barrel iSight that Apple has been hawking for years now. Space for secret eating?

While I was typing this, I picked up the Apple Remote, just on a whim. I hit the menu button and nearly fell out of my chair. When Apple revealed Front Row, I was all meh about it... because I'm never going to watch movies on my iMac, and if I want to browse my music or photos, well, that's what iTunes and iPhoto are for. But when I clicked through those areas of Front Row (after that killer transition from desktop to Front Row that has to be seen to be fully appreciated), I was knocked senseless by how cool it was. Here's what Apple's dopey marketing message did not fully illuminate for me: Front Row and the Apple Remote turn your iMac into a giant iPod. Play music, run slideshows (and movies, I guess) all from one tiny remote, using the basic familiar iPod interface. Why didn't they just tell me that in the first place?

Although, knowing me, even if I had gotten that message out of all the smiling family stock photography and smirky-cool marketing text, I probably still wouldn't have cared. I had to see it in action to like it.

It's good to be back. I had a lot of stuff I fully intended to weblog over the past month, and just didn't since my workflow was grenaded. Updates to my stupid neighbor's house, more talk about Metal Gear, an Infinite Crisis wrapup, Clark pictures, Animal Crossing, the PS2 retrospective... I even wanted to have kicked off a GameCube Farewell feature by now. So maybe I'll get to some of that now. Maybe.

This is probably the coolest thing I've yet seen from this year's E3: Solid Snake will be in the new Super Smash Bros.

Pictures, interviews and trailer available, as always, on Kotaku.

Last year, the PS3 stole the show from the Xbox 360. This year, the PS3 stole our wallets. $600? Really? There is now no freaking way that I'm there for a Day One PS3 purchase. Not at that price.

There is also a $500 version planned - so we'll have two PS3s to choose from, just like the dual Xbox 360s - but even that is out of control. The $500 has a smaller hard drive (which already makes it better than the gimped 360), no WiFi (which sucks) and no HDMI output. I would much rather trade out the stinking blu-ray. Give me a PS3 with the 60gig HD, the WiFi, and everything else, take out the blu-ray, and I'll give you $300. Then I'll pick up three launch titles and an extra controller, which will almost get me to $500 anyway. This was the deal we struck six years ago on the PS2, Sony.

All Nintendo has to do is get those cheap, shiny Wiis out a week before the PS3, and Sony will be scrambling for the Brighter Side press release.

Oh, here's something Nintendo should have thought of first: Sony's upcoming EyeToy game Eye of Judgement. It's a real world card game that you play in front of the EyeToy camera. When you play a monster card, the EyeToy recognizes it and animates the creature onscreen, hopefully doing whatever you intended for it to do, attack, defend, sacrifice it for life points, who knows.

Huh. If only Nintendo owned some kind of monster-battling card game that desparately needed a good video game shot-in-the-arm. You know, something the kids could really get into, with toys and cartoons and stuff.

Rockstar placed the next GTA title at October 2007. Nice going. Now everybody is just going to wait for October 2007 to buy a PS3 and hope there has been a price drop by then. (And starting at $600, there will almost have to be a substantial drop before the second holiday season.) GTA4 will actually come out for Xbox 360 first; up until now, the GTA games have always kinda tiptoed across the way to Xbox a couple months later, to no great effect. Sony probably should have paid cash money to have the franchise exclusive to PlayStation... but they probably wanted to keep a safe legal distance from GTA, since the game regularly has to catch hardballs from over-eager, anti-freedom politicos. Regardless of exclusivity, nobody thinks of the Xbox as the "home" of the GTA series, so getting another lame-ass tattoo about it was just Head Shill Peter Moore being a dick again. Does this dude have to SHOCK us with a new tattoo every year now?

Microsoft was thrilled to announce that GTA4 will have additional downloadable content, which raises several important points. First, Microsoft lies about stuff all the time. "Exclusive" to them can mean it is an exclusive title/feature for three months. Second, the PS3 will also have online play and a hard drive, so what's to stop them from distributing additional GTA4 content? And thirdly, "additional downloadable content" is marketing-speak for "junky extra crap that you have to pay for."

You know, when Nintendo had the eReader and started selling trading cards that unlocked additional content in GBA and GameCube games, everybody unzipped their flies and pissed hot lava on it. Now that Microsoft is nickel-and-diming gamers to download new horse saddles, it's the fucking Second Coming. And what's up with "pundits" and "critics" and "reviewers" getting excited about all the upcoming "interconnectivity" between the PS3 and the PSP? Nintendo held that party three years ago, and I was the only one there.

About that Wii. I daresay that we're all starting to take the name seriously! "Wii" was not a bait-and-switch press grab fake out, as everyone previously hoped. The remote controller is a perfect gimmick interface for a new Wario Ware game. I'm looking forward to seeing how Wario Ware (frightening how quickly that became a franchise, eh?) and the other big names - Metroid, Sonic, Mario, Resident Evil - translate to the remote. HOWEVER, I am not looking forward to this:

Nintendo: I am not interesting in playing games like that.

I want to sit down on a comfortable couch and play my games. Not jump around all over the damn place. By the way, I titled that image "wiiner.jpg."

The Wii controller has a speaker in it, surprise. As well as rumble. So that will be cute. I would have liked the thing to have a mic, for use in future karaoke or Mario Party games.

Hey, did you notice? I think this is an entire E3 without mention of a new Mario Party game.

There is a new GameCube bongo game though, so that's cool. And Super Paper Mario looks awesome. I'm a little put-off by TWO versions of Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, one for GameCube and one for Wii. We had previously been led to believe that the same GameCube disc would just gain magical powers when put into a Wii. ("Revolution." *sniff*) The Wii features (wiitures?) of Twilight Princess seem pretty extensive, so I suppose Nintendo could have just switched to a Wii version and given a big middle finger to all the droolly GameCubers out there. Even though we probably should have all been playing GCN Twilight Princess by now; I'll bet it was all the Wii-dev that delayed the title in the first place. Nintendo has made great hay in the last decade of being the one "good" video game company, despite their monopolistic practices of the NES days. So it is nice that they didn't abandon the GameCube version entirely.

Nintendo released images of the "standard" Wii controller, IE the one you're going to use for all your old games, your ported games, and your old ported games. Which better damn well come shipped with the unit. I'm not even going to post a pic of it, because it looks like a Dual Shock. Same interior-positioned twin analog sticks, four shoulder buttons, etc. It would be nice if Nintendo could stick with the same controller design from one generation to the next, because there is an advantage to controller continuity. I liked the GameCube controller, but if it had to be changed for the Wii, I guess I'm glad they made it feel more like the PlayStation standard.

Speaking of that, Sony revealed their PS3 controller... which is no longer a pseudo-future concept-prototype space-boomerang. It is - TA DA - exactlythesameasthePS2scontroller. Duh. Thanks for listening, Sony! Now if you would have canned that terrible Spider-Man font. Interestingly, the rumble has been removed (legal reasons, I believe)... which makes me wonder if they can even call it the Dual Shock anymore, since didn't that specifically refer to the two internal vibration motors?

Now that Sony has their own Xbox Live system coming - which will be free - and Nintendo has their own Xbox Live system coming - which will be free - Microsoft was scrambling to show how their Xbox Live - which is not free - will be worth paying for. Their answer is to tie it to Windows Vista! Hooray! Who cares what all the customer confidence surveys show! Let's take our one product that has been a word-of-mouth success (albeit not a financial one) and marry it to our other product that everybody hates! And if you buy a Madonna video on your 360, you'll be able to watch it on your cell phone! Yes!

Seriously, this will never happen. Or, like the new season of Survivor, it will happen but no one will care. It's the kind of thing that a company announces as some kind of far-flung future dream feature, but by the time it happens, it is so hobbled and hamstrung that it is barely recognizable as the glorious experience once promised.

Like Windows Vista itself, actually.

Does a bad game get better if you play it alongside others who know it's a bad game?

It does, but there's a definite curve to it. Unlike MST3K - which is funny in two hours - a bad video game has potentially hours upon hours of agonizing gameplay... so if you want to play a bad game on purpose, you need to watch for the inevitable late-night burnout and schedule a follow-up night to keep the sarcastic excitement high.

You know, who has time for this. If you're going to get together with pals and play stuff, you want to get right to the good games. Especially once everybody moves off the dorm floor and you need a third party arbitrator to all make it to the same party again. So you stick with your Smash Bros and Soul Caliburs and Mario Parties and Halos and you play what you know will be a hit. Even Mike and I - and we're together quite a bit - rarely get into something that we fully expect to be hilariously awful. Aside from all-night jags into mediocre-yet-pleasantly-thoughtless games like Trapt or the last two LOTR button mashers, the closest we've come to playing a genuinely ridiculous game was when I finished Disaster Report and then told him he had to play it too.

But when a copy of 24: The Game, floated into our office one bright spring day, Tony, Josh and I agreed that we had to schedule a joint session. How could this game possibly be any good? Moreover, none of us are big 24 fans, so being able to ruthlessly examine the game/show's watered-down international espionage and assassination storyline also struck us as a good time.

We began the evening by playing Trapt, a happily crappy game that proves that great gameplay doesn't necessarily require great visuals. This was the most fun to be had all night. Then we started 24 around 9:30pm. TICK. TOCK. Here's how our Mega 24 Session went:

Hour 1 (These are game hours, not real-world hours, by the way.)
Josh kicked off the game in grand style, taking Jack Bauer deep into the tutorial level. The first mission has Jack leading a team of CTU nobodies into a ship, where some random group of bad guys are guarding a BOMB. Holy crap, Jack! A bomb!

I always feel bad for games like this. They're trying. The game has a super-serious storyline it wants to tell you, but 98% of all the jerks who play this game are going to spend the first level running around like an idiot, shooting Jack's team, and killing hostages. So much for drama.

Initial impressions: walking, shooting, aiming, turning around, and sprinting are fucked up.

Then we encountered the first weird puzzle mini-game, the Defuse A Bomb game. It was stupid-easy. Maybe they'll get harder later.

Hour 2
Tony took the Dual Shock for this level, which introduced us to Someone Who Was Not Jack. You also get to drive a car here. There's also a cutscene with some important bad guys who you have to kill five minutes later. So they're not important at all. But it is still mainly a walk-and-shoot mission, since you're indoors and the jeep you hijack blows up rather easily.

Hour 3
Now it was my turn. I had to chase some dude into a building and capture him. Again, more fun with the game's wonky shooting system... which we determined was probably designed under the instructions "rip off Metal Gear, but make it sucky. And also include Half-Life's healing stations." I encountered another puzzle mini-game, the Decrypt A Door Password game, which was vaguely Panel de Pon-ish. When you find the jerk to be captured, you cap him a couple of times and then use the R2 button to shout at him. The shouting encourages him to surrender, because otherwise, he intends to kill you. Keifer Sutherland's dreamy voice has this effect on people.

Hour 4
Capturing Whats-His-Face gets you into a special Interrogation Mission! Tony pulled the short straw on this one, since Josh got a phone call.

Interrogating is another weirdo mini-game, this time requiring you to use three buttons options (Aggression, Coax and Calm) to get the guy's heart rate into a specific part on a changing scale. Hit it right, and he talks. Interesting idea, and, as we have now come to expect with 24: The Game, unintentionally hilarious. It went something like this:

game suggests hitting coax button...
Jack: "I need to know about the plan to kill the vice president."
Dude: "I don't know anything, man!"
game suggests hitting calm button...
Jack: "I'll get you medical help as soon as you tell me about the snipers."
Dude: "I don't know how many there are, I swear!"
game suggests hitting aggression button...
Jack: "TELL ME WHAT I NEED TO KNOW NOW!"
Dude: "Wah wah blah blah bleeding out wah."
game suggests hitting calm button...
Jack: "Hey, I'll help you if you help me. How about them snipers, eh smooky?"
Dude: "They're on the roofs along the parade route."
game suggests hitting aggression button...
Jack: "SNIPERS ON ROOFS? OMFG!!?! I'LL KILL YOU RIGHT HERE AND NOW! GIVE ME NAMES!"
Dude: "Habba ba ba baaaa, wah wah help wah."

To sum up, Jack Bauer is totally schizo.

After that wonderful scene, Tony got to do a Find The Snipers mini-game where he had to scan through the blueprints of nearby buildings to find likely sniper suspects. It was just as weird as it sounds, and completely implausible. Then Josh did a Kill The Snipers portion that was nothing but Silent Scope without the bit where you zoom in on bikini girls for a health refill.

Hour 5
This hour begins with yet another absurd mini-game... based on defragmenting a hard drive. Boy, how many times did I watch Norton Speed Disk click by and wish I had a game based on it. Josh sailed through this one (have I mentioned yet that almost every level is timed?) and then had to do another decryption mini-game.

The next bit takes you (as Not Jack) to Korea Town, where you have to talk a hapless store clerk stereotype through an embarrassing dialogue tree. This isn't an Interrogation, it's just bargain basement RPG speaks. But it gets better, because the suspect bolts and you have to chase him through some alleyways... which is hilarious because the sprint action makes you careen wildly off of nearby walls like a ping pong ball. And the guy you're chasing keeps pulling lighter-than-air dumpsters and boxes and ladders into your way.

Seems kind of unlikely that all of that would take an hour, doesn't it?

Hour 6
Now I got to drive Not Jack across town. Driving is miserable. So many games get driving so right, that when a game falls short, it is highly obvious. This is not Burnout or Ridge Racer. This isn't even GTA. It's pushing an octopus through mud.

The driving scene took two minutes, so I got to do the next mission as well... back to running and shooting. By this time, I felt more or less okay with the gimpy control scheme. It is possible to hide behind a wall, pop out and shoot dudes, and remain relatively safe. It's just not very smooth. And as soon as you get surrounded, forget it. I captured the guy. Hooray.

Hour 7
Tony did another super short driving mission, then a mission inside a subway station. You have to find yet another guy - which ends up stupid because you just walk into a room (after killing hundreds of lowlies) and he just stands there. At the conclusion of this mission, the CTU headquarters are taken over by terrorists! The subway scare was just a distraction! F'ing hell!

Hour 8
Josh's turn again: Now you get to play as Michelle, who you always see in the promos leaning over a computer and talking urgently into a headpiece. So that we can rip off Resident Evil 4 (or Fatal Frame 2, or Ico, or Oddworld, or any other game where you have to lead around a helpless secondary character), Michelle is saddled with Kim... who happens to be Jack's trouble-magnet daughter. You can tell her to Follow! or Wait!, but you don't really need to. I don't recall Kim taking much damage at all.

Michelle does really well, whacking baddies and stashing Kim into a panic room, until the cutscene at the conclusion of the level, when she gets kidnapped or something. Tony was playing this part; I looked away for a second and missed it.

After Jack and Not Jack meet up and do some hand-wringing, it is agreed that Kim should get her own level. I think we all took a shot at this one, because it is easy to take Kim in over her head. To complete the Metal Gear riff, you spend a lot of time crawling through massive air ducts in the first person.

Hour 9
Tony took Jack through another walk/sneak/shoot/babysit the camera mission, which ends on a boss fight! Whoo! Against a helicopter! Double whoo! I got to take out the chopper with a machine gun... which is exactly how I would do it in real life. Hell, in Disaster Report, you have to use a fire hose, so this was a piece of cake.

Now a driving mission that we all suffered through, because this was the final mission of the night. It's 1:00am by now, and we've all pretty much hit the wall. The idea is that you're playing as the REAL bad guys (I think), who are making their getaway with Kim as a hostage, who has dramatically offered herself in exchange for saving the rest of the kidnapped CTU folks (except for the one poor tech jerk who gets shot in the back of the head.)

You have to get to a certain spot on the map, but without any cops following you. Hi, GTA! We found this distressingly difficult. The cops are six-star aggressive, ramming you and chasing you without fail. After we all failed to ditch the police and park the car under the time limit, we called an ignominious end to 24: The Evening.

Time will tell if we do it again. That car mission really pissed us off.

Easily one of my top five PS2 games. Maybe even top three.

At first glance, I thought FF2 was a little too similar to the first Fatal Frame: lost and confused female adrift in a phantom reality of gruesome traditions designed to keep the gates of hell closed at all costs. But that's sort of the series' baseline, like how Sonic's baseline is to reach the end of the level. How the game presents that concept, and how you survive the telling of it, is where it has a chance to differentiate itself. Crimson Butterfly, with its one-twin-must-kill-the-other strangulation ritual, manages to even out-creep FF1's infamous Blinding Mask.

The storyline of FF2 is horrifying but satisfying. It hits on family, on tradition, on duty, on suffering, on sacrifice. This game will make your soul hurt.

Like no other survival horror series, Fatal Frame has mastered actually being scary. I don't mean shocking or surprising or gory... I mean scary. This is a game that I still remember like it was yesterday.

Memory Score: To this day, I'm still slightly afraid of a quiet jingly bell noise.

We had some fun with this one. It's a great idea - have a video game judge your singing ability - but the weak presentation make it seem like it was put together in a month. And I still don't see why the song list caps out at 30 or so... there should be 3x that many songs. Needs more unlockables too.

Make one of these with a downloadable and upgradeable jukebox, and you've got something. These one actually has a menu option for accepting a booster disk of new songs, but, surprise surprise, they never actually delivered on that. Instead, if you want new content, you have to buy a whole new game. Way to avoid the technology.

Memory Score: Rhonda unlocked everything in one day when she was off work and I wasn't.

I'm a Lupin fan, so no amount of mediocre reviews could warn me off of this one.

I probably should have heeded them. It's a weird little entry-level Metal Gear with a ton of problems. Lame graphics, a storyline that gives up on making sense halfway through, and lots of good ideas with bad implementation. (The disguise system is remarkably tedious. Dressing as a security guard, for example, also requires that you salute each guard every time they suspect you for a fraud. And since they look at you every three seconds, that means you are saluting every three seconds.)

Still, the voice work was great, the character designs and movements were very true to the anime, and it didn't take very long to beat.

Eventually, you start wondering why Lupin the master thief is facing off against giant mud gargoyles. Luckily, once you hit that point, you're about done.

Memory Score: Something for the fans. And people who like saluting.

Next time: A big franchise online game that completely sucked, an action game that is the best of a rarely seen genre, and a cult favorite that I just could not get into!