Unbecoming Levity

DRM, Electronic Arts, and Censorship

Abacquer — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 20:52:45 -0400

So, the creators of Spore, Electronic Arts, created an online discussion forum where people could talk about Spore. Unfortunately they made the mistake of offering a feedback forum where people could post feedback about the game, and the reviews are positively ghastly. So many people are irate about how shallow the game is and the various bugs in it that last week EA released a patch for the game, only a week after the game went to market. Anybody in software development knows what happens when you rush a patch out the door. And it happened big time... the patch made the game experience WORSE for a lot of users, fixing some bugs but creating a whole host of new ones. Interest in the game is visibly on the wane, online Spore traffic has been pretty much falling since day one and people are already clamoring for "expansion packs". It's generally not a good sign if you are looking for game expansions after owning the game for one week. By comparison I've owned Oblivion IV for over a year now and I only purchased one of the available expansions. I haven't needed to buy any more because there is plenty of content there to keep I (and my family) entertained. But I digress..

The interesting thing is (as you might expect) a number of EA's customers are not at all pleased that they are limited to 3 installs of their game before it won't install anymore, and some are unhappy with SecuRom being installed on their machines without their consent. So along with feedback about various other flaws in the game, EA gets plenty of feedback about DRM and the headaches it is causing their customers.

Which they delete.

Yeah, you heard that right. If you post feedback about the DRM in Spore, they simply delete your feedback. They don't want customers discussing DRM or complaining about DRM. And the reason is quite simply this:

DRM does not stop pirates. It never did. The day Spore was released, there was already a DRM-free hacked version available for download from the various piracy sites. ANYBODY who did not have an ethical problem with stealing the game, could simply download a fully functional pirate version. Personally, I think game makers should be paid for their efforts, so this is not an option for me.

Electronic Arts isn't staffed by morons--they have tech savvy engineers working there who know full well that DRM will not stop pirates. So why do they keep claiming they put it in there to prevent pirates from stealing their game? Why is it really there?

My theory (and a lot of other people think so too) is they want to control (or basically kill) the resale market. If you want to play Spore and figure you'll buy a used copy in a year or so, think again. By putting the install limit on the game, EA prevents you from selling your property to a third party when you tire of it. Why would anyone buy Spore if it had only 1 install left, or less? So if someone wants Spore six months from now, they're going to have to buy it from EA--or they will get stiffed on reinstalls if one is ever needed.

That's fairly evil and a number of people (including myself) have posted threads to that effect on EA's feedback forum only to have them quietly disappear.

Which is also evil.

Spore by Electronic Arts -- Video Game Review

Abacquer — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 05:49:48 -0400

Okay, so gamers everywhere are upset about the Digital Rights Management that comes packaged with Spore. If you don't have an internet connection (because say, you are using a laptop while camping, or your internet modem is on the fritz) you can't play... even though there is nothing on the internet you actually NEED to play Spore. That's annoying, but if you are a home user who never upgrades their machine and has a solid internet connection, you may not care so much. So let's actually talk abut the GAME--how does it play? Is it fun?

The idea behind Spore is exciting and compelling... start with a microbe and evolve it into an intelligent spacefaring species. The game is basically broken into five minigames--and that right there is a sign of trouble--the Jack of all trades is a master of none. All five minigames have weaknesses and are pretty shallow simply because to invest too much development effort in one of the minigames means not investing it in others. Plus there are annoying inconsistencies in the camera controls for each minigame. What used to pan or zoom the camera in one minigame will do something else in the next, so at each transition you need to relearn how to do the same old things--that's right out of the Vista playbook... very irritating.

In conclusion, for $50 you get 5 games that are probably each worth about the $10 you are paying for them. You would probably be better served by spending your $50 on ONE really good game. I sure wish I hadn't bought this... because having played it one time through, I've gone from incredibly excited and interested by the game concept, to disappointed and bored. I have zero interest in ever playing this game again. Oblivion, Warcraft, and Civilization are all far better than Spore. Don't waste your money.

What follows are detailed reviews of the five games in Spore.

Minigame #1 - The Microbe Stage
Ignoring for a moment that evolution is *not* a directed process, and therefore the concept behind the game is annoying if you are a scientist, the idea is promising. But swimming around in fluid and nibbling bits of food gets tired very quick. The graphics are very pretty, but users will likely get bored with the microbial stage very quickly. As your germ wanders around it will collect "DNA points" that can be spent when it mates to pay for additional (or better) body parts.

Minigame #2 - The Creature Stage
All microbes must evolve into land creatures. Why? It's a testament to the shallowness of this game. Germs become land animals. You can give your creatures wings, but they can't live in trees or cliff walls... all they can do is wander around on the ground. You can't choose to stay in the ocean and become an intelligent underwater race. You can't burrow into the ground and become an intelligent underground race. You cannot evolve or design plant life, or become an intelligent plant species. The implication in the game is that though evolution you can evolve whatever you want. You can't. All you can control is the basic shape of your creature, its behavior toward other creatures, and what body parts it has. And it is in the creature-creating portion of the game where most of the development time seems to have been spent.

But even this too is annoyingly limited. The game wants all creatures to be vertebrates with bilateral symmetry--want to make a giant starfish? Too bad for you. Want a creature with two arms on one side and none on the other? Too bad for you.

One of the depressing things about this is that body parts don't actually DO anything. All they do is change your creature's stats. Adding a pointed spike gives the creature a "strike" ability, but adding two spikes doesn't make any difference, nor does changing the position of the spike or even its size. There's no reason not to throw your creature together haphazardly, because the actual arrangement of body parts has no effect on the game. Once the user realizes this, the illusion is shattered and the process of developing creatures becomes boring.

Many of the body parts are completely cosmetic and do nothing at all. Give your creature eyes on the back of its head and it gets no advantage whatsoever. There are dozens of different "arms" and "legs" available, and they are all hard to distinguish from each other, and universally all do the same thing. Add a particular leg to your creature and now it has a leg. Choose a different leg and the creature's stats are unchanged. So why bother having different legs then? And why do all the arms and legs essentially look the same? There are no hairy legs, legs with more joints, pseudopods, wrinkly legs, insectoid legs, etc.

Creatures have 4 basic social behaviors--singing, posing, dancing, and charming, and 4 antisocial behaviors--biting, striking, charging, and spitting. You can pretty much think of your creature as a tally sheet with a score for each of these behaviors. A creature with "sing 4" is really good at singing. The animations for the behaviors are very pretty, but to initiate them is a little clunky and extremely repetitive. Making friends or killing enemies gets tired fast. And unsurprisingly, the game rapidly progresses through the creature stage and tries to push you into the tribal stage.

Minigame #3 - The Tribal Stage
Gather food, try to make friends (or destroy) neighboring tribes. That about sums this stage up. It will remind you of the original warcraft games where your drones gather resources to make buildings, but it isn't as involved. It will remind you of civilization where you can sort-of acquire new technologies and interact with outher cultures, but it isn't as involved. Fact is there are already good games that do both of these things better, and since this game tries to cram in both of them, it does neither well. This stage is shallow but blissfully short. One thing that might annoy you is that all the time you spent developing your creature's physical traits pretty much become irrelevant at this stage of the game (and in every stage after).

Minigame #4 - The Civilization Stage
Now instead of fighting (or befriending) tribes of different creatures, you are fighting or befriending nations of creatures like yourself. The animations are stunning, but again the tactics are pretty shallow. There is no deep strategy to be found here, no clever interplay of various social forces. And this stage of the game too will end fairly quickly.

Minigame #5 - The Space Stage
So you finally made it. The grand conclusion of the game... and it isn't fun at all. At this point you should be controlling worlds and commanding fleets of ships, and instead you are basically an errand boy. You get one ship to fly around in and fly around you will. All that creature development is just a distant memory now... your beautiful creation is just a face on a communicator screen. You will receive missions that basically boil down into two types: (1) go to this planet and scan/pick up/bring back a certian item or items within a time limit, (2) go to a planet and kill all the creatures/beings that are glowing yellow in a certain time limit.

Just getting around is annoying. A mission says "go to planet Dingly Ball and bring back a Pferdburper plant", so the first thing you do is go to your star map (in steps, each step requiring a lengthy animation that you CANNOT skip) and you might expect to see a clear indication of the star you are supposed to go to. Sometimes you will but usually you won't and you spend your time hovering your mouse over each star to try and find the one with the right name. Yeesh... the star should have a blinking colored flag sticking out of it to tell you it is your objective... or the names of stars should appear next to them. There's no end of things that ought to be in here to make it less annoying.

As you try to negotiate trade routes or carry out missions you will CONSTANTLY be running back home to defend your homeworld (or your colonies) from pirates or enemies. Every such encounter is exactly the same and rapidly becomes infuriatingly stupid. I have a spacefaring race but I can only make one ship at a time? Why can't I build a defense force and leave guards on each planet so I am not constantly running back and forth to fight the same boring fights over and over again?

And the ship-to-ship combat is the absolute worst. Clunky as heck, and for all the pretty ships and lovely explosions, very little actual information is communicated to you... there is no useful tactical display--like say, coloring enemies differenly from friendlies, or automatically coloring ships in range differently from those out of range.

The space stage is, frankly, dismal... and should have been left out of the game altogether.

Scumbag at Work

Abacquer — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:04:29 -0400

An Australian video game designer has caused a major uproar Down Under with his creation of a game based on the Virginia Tech massacre.

Called V-Tech Rampage, the game has several levels of "stealth and murder," reports The Sydney Morning Herald.

But what really is causing the kerfuffle--as if the game itself wasn't in bad enough taste--is that its designer, Ryan Lambourn, says he will take the game down from his Web site only if the public comes up with a $2,000 payoff.

For another grand, he'll apologize...

-- Game designer causes uproar with Virginia Tech game (Tech News Blog)

Halo 3

Abacquer — Wed, 16 May 2007 09:36:47 -0400

Yippee!

Sony Needs a Dope Slap

Abacquer — Tue, 01 May 2007 09:08:45 -0400

I really need to add a "WTF" category to this blog. I had heard about this peripherally and figured it was just an urban legend, but it's not. In the last few days Sony released its new adult-oriented video game God of War II for the PlayStation console. Recently they had a big "European launch party" in Greece for members of the press who write about video game news. They tried to theme the party to match the nature of the game, so the party featured an actor dressed up as the hero from the game (okay, you might expect this), games involving throwing knives and pulling live snakes from pits (?), topless women who hand fed grapes to the guests (WTF?), and as a centerpiece, the decapitated carcass of a freshly slaughtered goat (WTF!!?).

Now it's not the first time Sony has done something amazingly stupid to promote their wares, but, as you can imagine not everyone was cool with a slaughtered animal being used as a "prop" at a party. Guests were invited to reach into the goat's lacerated body, pull out entrails, and eat them. The entrails had in fact been replaced with some sort of Greek dish that resembled intestines. Yum.

If a goat had been killed and served as a dish which guests could eat, that probably would have been fine... I mean anyone who eats meat is eating a killed animal. But to morbidly lay out a dead animal at your dinner party with its head hanging off as a lurid decoration? That's just disgusting, cruel, morbid, and a waste of an animal. According to Sony the goat carcass was purchased from a loal butcher and then returned to the butcher after the party.

Apparently it has finally occurred to Sony that this whole party really wasn't such a great idea. Mostly because of the backlash from animal rights groups, Sony has issued an apology.

From Sony Apologizes For Decapitated Goat In 'God Of War' Launch (InformationWeek via Yahoo! News):
..."On this occasion we recognize that we fell short of our normal high standards of conduct and apologize for any offense caused," Sony said in a statement. "We are conducting an internal inquiry into the circumstances of the event in order to learn from the occurrence and put in place measures to ensure that this does not happen again."...

The article goes on and quotes animal rights activists decrying the use of the goat's carcass, and a professor of marketing who calls the party centerpiece "stupid".

Which is all expected of course, but what I find intriguing is that nobody quoted seems to have any complaints about topless women feeding grapes to the partygoers. Okay, of course they are performers, and they were paid to perform this service, but it hardly seems appropriate for a video game launch party. The use of "pretty girls" at product launches or other types of retail expositions is not a new thing, and includes some sort of compensation, typically money, but not always. But this goes beyond anything I've heard of before. I would expect something like this at say a strip joint* or something like that, but a video game launch party for the press? WTF were they thinking?

Here's an article from 1Up.com recapping the event and including a picture which is probably NSFW.

That's effed up, yo.

*: Which is not to say I've ever been to a strip joint. For the curious, no I haven't. I have no interest in watching ecdysiasts perform live. That would be way too embarrassing for me.

With Virginia Tech Fresh in Our Memory

Abacquer — Fri, 27 Apr 2007 15:52:11 -0400

...So I had this dream last night where I went into a building, pulled out two P90s and started shooting everyone, then had sex with the dead bodies. Well, not really, but it would be funny if I did...

-- Allen Lee, Carly-Grove High School Student

Allen Lee wrote some seriously disturbed crap during a "Free Writing" assignment in his high school English class this week. Apparently the instructions on the assignment made clear that the students were not to censor themselves and should instead write whatever came to mind. The point was to keep writing and not to stop until the time ran out. Allen's essay begins "Blood sex and Booze. Drugs Drugs Drugs are fun. Stab, Stab, Stab, S…t…a…b…, poke." The end of the essay concludes with a message to his teacher: "No quarrel on you qualifications as a writer, but as a teacher, don't be surprised on inspiring the first cg shooting." The "cg" refers to "Carly-Grove", the name of Allen's school.

It is evident from his essay that he has an extremely low opinion of his teacher, and English in general. So I suppose it's possible he selected subject matter most calculated to upset the teacher. If so, the calculations were spot-on. Allen's teacher apparently called the police, and now he is charged with disorderly conduct according to the Chicago Tribune. You can read Allen's entire essay here.

I read the last sentence of Allen's essay as a threat, and therefore I am not at all surprised that some sort of discipline is in order, and I fail to see why Allen would be surprised. But apparently a lot of people are surprised because they seem to be leaping to his defense and claiming that the teacher/school are overreacting.

In the meantime Allen is planning to join the Marines.

The questions here are, are these the ravings of a deranged mind, or a normal high school student attempting to undertake a free writing assignment and making a poor choice of subject matter? Was arresting him an appropriate reaction or an overreaction?

What do you think?

Still Here...

Abacquer — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:58:20 -0500

This sucks. Man will I ever get better? I'm doing a little work from bed these days, but only a few hours a day. Nights are still the worst... coughing fits and so forth. At least twice now the coughing fits have been so severe they've led to puking fits... or whatever you call it... you cough hard a few times and then you ralph up a little lunch. And then you do it again. Cough-cough-cough-wretch. Cough-cough-cough-wretch. Loads of fun. Doc has recommended Mucinex DM for that, and it seems to be helping.

I stopped taking the Vicodin and the flavors of things seem to be coming back. Now I take Tylenol when I start feeling discomfort.

Here's a snapshot of my little world.

Daytime television is awful. There's very little worth watching and on some channels they have perhaps 10 commercials (or less) which they will rotate through multiple times every hour. The Science Channel is one of the worst offenders. The first time I saw their ad for their upcoming show about an expedition to Borneo, I thought it looked interesting. Upon seeing this same damn commercial repeated 2000 times, I realized I have no interest in watching the Expedition to Borneo. Know why? Because all the way through it I will have to watch some other endlessly repeated commercial that will make me nuts. Eff that.

Oh and GEICO? All your commercials make me want to do is stomp that stupid lizard to death.

So I've mostly been rotating through the Discovery Channel, the National Geographic Channel, the Science Channel, and occasionally G4TV. Heavy use of the MUTE button on my TV remote to shut out the annoying commercials. I saw an interesting show about the Cassini orbiter, and another about gamma ray bursts. Most of it hasn't stayed with me.

G4TV... what the heck happened? Didn't this use to be the video game channel? What's all this other crap? The Jamie Kennedy Experiment? WTF has that got to do with hot games?

In its defence the best show I've seen this week was on G4TV and it wasn't about videogames. It was an English subtitled Japanese show called "Ninja Warrior" (in Japan the show is called "Sasuke"). Hundreds of contestants from around the world compete to be a "ninja warrior". How? By attempting to cross an extremely challenging obstacle course in four stages. The obstacles are nightmarish and I really felt for the contestants. The courses were so difficult, it was typical to have no winner at all.

G4TV ran about 8 episodes of Ninja Warrior back to back on Sunday. Apparently some time passed (like several months) between each new round of attempts on the course. During those intervals the courses would also change somewhat, obstacles would be added and removed, as if it wasn't challenging enough for some of these guys who were building their own copies of the courses and training at home. Oh did I mention that most of the stages had time limits?

On the last episode, the guy I had been rooting for (it really pulled me in) finally won, being only the second person to ever complete the course. It was pretty intense.

In some ways it reminded me of American Idol, because some of the people who showed up to compete were actors, or comedians, or beauty queens, or whatever--clearly untrained and only looking to get their few minutes on camera. One guy who showed up every time was a sculptor who built miniature models of the ninja warrior course. The models were exquisite and delicate. And their creator was also obviously delicate... he was clearly a very frail little man who had no chance of completing the course, and yet he would attempt to run it anyway, failing spectacularly at the very first obstacle every time and falling in the drink.

I enjoyed the show a lot. If you get a chance to catch it sometime, check it out.

Well I'm getting tired. Hope everyone out there is happy and healthier than I.

Have Game Designers Forgotten How?

Abacquer — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 09:59:20 -0500

Although it is very nice to have the XBOX 360, the current crop of games out for the system has me wondering if it is even worth it to purchase one. It's great to have hi-def output of course, and there's no doubt in my mind that it is a better system. But the dearth of good games for the platform is appalling. If I wanted a great piece of hardware with shockingly few good games, I'd have bought a Macintosh. The only conclusion I can come up with is that game designers are rushing to produce games for the 360 and therefore cutting corners. The sad outcome of all this is that I have a sleek new xbox 360, and I am just not using it that often at all.

I recently picked up 2 new games because a gamer friend at work who is typically on top of the game scene said they were "awesome". They are not "awesome", and I have previously noted how the word "awesome" has become meaningless in the world of video games. In that same article I also noted that typical video game ratings are gratuitously inflated on GameSpot. Remember, the GameSpot versus reality scale?

The two new games I tried were Dead Rising and Lost Planet. Lost Planet was better than Dead Rising, but not by much, and both games fall into the "too boring to finish" category. It is both sad and confusing to me that when I go online I find people on discussion fora raving about these games--people must actually be enjoying these boring experiences--and I wonder if game designers are trying to redefine the game experience to the point where folks have lowered expectations.

GameSpot	Me	Review
8.1	4.0	Lost Planet: Extreme Condition: Think 1980's. The reason I suggest that, is that the 1980's saw the introduction of the "big boss battle" to arcade games. This was done for one reason, and one reason only, to keep the kids pumping quarters into the machine for longer periods of time. If the game had no "bosses" you could become very good at it and go for long periods of time without having to dump in another quarter. Enter the boss, a huge opponent that fought like nothing else in the game, was much much harder to kill, and usually required a certain trick or technique to eliminate which would only be learned by dying over and over as the player attempted to figure out how to beat it, all the while dropping quarter after quarter into the game. The essential problem is that the "big boss battle" has become ingrained in the minds of game designers (and some players as well) as something you're "supposed to have". And even though nobody is putting quarters in a slot to play, some designers are still coming up with bosses as if that is what players want. To be fair, some players do enjoy that, but I am not one of them. It's not because I can't beat the bosses--I can and do all the time--it's simply that I have no interest in doing so. I want the game and the story to keep moving, and getting stuck on a giant creature that I have to fight for an hour as I figure out all the places to move and the magic spots where the creature has to be hit a zillion times for it to die is not my idea of fun. To me, that's a chore, a pain in the ass I have to get through to get on to the next level where I can explore and have fun again. Lost Planet might as well be called Boss Planet. The entire game is essentially one lame boss battle after another, which is too bad. The idea is interesting (humans fighting off alien insects on a frozen world where heat is a commodity), and the game has moments where it entertains (exploring caverns and fighting off hordes of insects), but in the end it focusses almost entirely on fighting the big boss, which bores the shit out of me. On one level I started playing, and it took all of a minute to get to the boss. I thought to myself, "already?" The boss was a giant worm that lived under the ice and it took copious amounts of ammunition to destroy it. Once it was slain I began to proceed across the ice field where I had fought it and another giant worm popped up. Just like the last one, except that I had very little ammo left and no weapons where handy. I died time and time again trying to defeat the second worm until I finally went online for a hint. Here was the hint: you only have to fight the first worm, the others you just run past. THIS was the trick the player was supposed to figure out? You are SUPPOSED to fight these creatures until you get so bored and frustrated you just say "fuck it" and run away from them? What sort of head-up-the-ass idea is that? In total there are something like 5 giant worms, but unlike the first one, the others you can just "run away from". When you get to the other side of the field you explore for about 30 seconds and then find a new boss to fight. A completely different (boring) battle where you fight this same enemy over and over until you figure it out, and then, the level is over. Are you kidding me? So you can sum up this level like so: 1 minute exploring, fighting hordes, a half hour fighting a giant worm and figuring out you have to run away from its brethren to move on, 30 more seconds exploring and fighting hordes, another 15 minutes figuring out how to defeat a chick in some battle armor. Essentially the whole level is just two big boss battles. This redefines boredom. It would be as entertaining if you had to walk, real-time, for 45 minutes across a barren ice plain to get to the end of the level. Your character depends on "Vital Suits" for much of the game. This is basically like power-armor or a battle mech from mech assault. A big walking robot you climb inside of and drive around. As you wander you can find ammo and upgrades for your suit, as well as thermal energy. But unfortunately, the game is pathetically episodic. After defeating the big boss, instead of being allowed to wander about and gather up scattered weapons, upgrades, and ammo, the level is just over. When the next level starts you may or may not have a vital suit, equipped with whatever the game chooses to give you. I played this game through about 60% of the way and became too bored to finish it. It didn't matter how hard the boss battles were. I didn't want to fight them, it was just too boring. I have to point out that Halo was one of the greatest games of all time and basically had no boss battles whatsoever. There were portions of the game where the hordes themselves were so efficient or prolific that you needed to learn new tactics to defeat them, but not because the creatures acquired special powers. As a result, what you had to learn was basically good battle tactics based on the lay of the land and what was available to you, not "where's the magic spot I have to shoot a million times to defeat this new giant creature I will never see again?"--i.e. what you learned had some applicable value later in the game. Further, it was largely open ended. A mission would not end until you chose to end it, and you could wander about forever and gather up goods. CAPCOM has been making boss battle games for years, and these guys seriously need to find a new idea.
8.4	3.0	Dead Rising: Also from CAPCOM, Dead Rising suffers from some of the same mistakes as Lost Planet, and some whole new ones. Here's a new idea, you are trapped in a shopping mall infested with the living dead. Wow, what a revolutionary idea... a veritable Dawn of the Dead setting with a Dawn of the Dead storyline where the zombies are just like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The game actually includes a disclaimer that any similarity between it and Dawn of the Dead is purely coincidental... my ass. That said, once you get in the mall you will find killing the zombies interesting for about 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, you might as well take the game out and put it away. It will never get any better. Every now and then you will come across a new way to kill the zombies, but since they are largely just lurching bags of skin and bones, it's not exactly challenging. The variety of ways in which to mutilate the animate corpses loses its novelty quickly. Further, the supply of zombies is limitless and they appear out of thin air. Clear out a section of hall, wander away, and then come back, and the zombies you defeated are gone and the hall is full of zombies again. In this way, the game suffers from the same problem that Destroy All Humans did... insanely repetitive gameplay. Note to game designers everywhere, I can't believe I have to tell you this but, mindless repetition is not entertaining, it's effing boring. Once the novelty wears off, the game simply devolves into a series of episodes, and in most cases these are "go find the live humans, and escort them to safety". The live humans are pathetically hopeless, and will basically stand around and let themselves be eaten, and often won't follow you when they should. And this is entertaining, how? Add to this an enforced time limit on missions and on the game (yes I'm not kidding) and it makes for yet another "chore posing as entertainment". I mean jesus, how do you make fighting for your life against an army of the undead boring? Hire CAPCOM, apparently. As if this weren't bad enough, you carry what amounts to a cellphone and you constantly receive phone calls on it from the mall's janitor, who tells you what missions are available. If you don't answer he will call incessantly. If you do answer you get a few seconds of reprieve before he starts calling again. Nothing like fighting a horde of zombies while your phone is ringing. CAPCOM being CAPCOM, this game also has its share of boss battles, but the bosses... are humans? They aren't zombies, they're just bad guys, and they are ridiculous. I fought one guy who was not wearing any sort of body armor and was not one of the undead. The fight took like 20 minutes and I put dozens of bullets into his abdomen with a pistol. And then he escaped by running away and climbing a rope. WTF? Beyond the issues of boring or poorly thought out gameplay, this game has severe technical flaws which detract from the enjoyment even more. Saving is thankfully, not checkpoint-based, but is area-based, which is even worse. You have to be in a specific location to save--a bathroom. And the bathrooms are not easy to find in the mall (just like in real life). As a result you have to wander, sometimes for several minutes or more, fighting zombies all the way, when you need to save and quit. That's just fucking stupid. Instead of making the save points be clearly marked locations right in the main hallways, they are tucked away and hard to find. Stupid beyond stupid. And here is the stupidest thing of all. You can't play this game without a high definition television. Note that it doesn't say this ANYWHERE on the game packaging or materials. In order to know what you are doing you have to be able to read text which appears in such a small font it is essentially a blurry smudge on anything but a high definition TV. You therefore cannot follow instructions, complete missions, or receive other important game information. It is insanely stupid beyond belief in that there is a ton of room onscreen, and this problem could be easily solved simply by making the text bigger. The first time I played the game I was using my upstairs TV which is not high-def and it was hopeless--I could not read the mission instructions. Later, after getting my HDTV repaired, I tried the game again and was able to read the instructions finally, but this did not make the game any more fun to play. So there you have it, the germ of a good idea ruined by game designers who frankly, should get out of the entertainment industry.

GameSpot

Review

8.1

4.0

Lost Planet: Extreme Condition:

Think 1980's. The reason I suggest that, is that the 1980's saw the introduction of the "big boss battle" to arcade games. This was done for one reason, and one reason only, to keep the kids pumping quarters into the machine for longer periods of time. If the game had no "bosses" you could become very good at it and go for long periods of time without having to dump in another quarter.

Enter the boss, a huge opponent that fought like nothing else in the game, was much much harder to kill, and usually required a certain trick or technique to eliminate which would only be learned by dying over and over as the player attempted to figure out how to beat it, all the while dropping quarter after quarter into the game.

The essential problem is that the "big boss battle" has become ingrained in the minds of game designers (and some players as well) as something you're "supposed to have". And even though nobody is putting quarters in a slot to play, some designers are still coming up with bosses as if that is what players want. To be fair, some players do enjoy that, but I am not one of them. It's not because I can't beat the bosses--I can and do all the time--it's simply that I have no interest in doing so. I want the game and the story to keep moving, and getting stuck on a giant creature that I have to fight for an hour as I figure out all the places to move and the magic spots where the creature has to be hit a zillion times for it to die is not my idea of fun. To me, that's a chore, a pain in the ass I have to get through to get on to the next level where I can explore and have fun again.

Lost Planet might as well be called Boss Planet. The entire game is essentially one lame boss battle after another, which is too bad. The idea is interesting (humans fighting off alien insects on a frozen world where heat is a commodity), and the game has moments where it entertains (exploring caverns and fighting off hordes of insects), but in the end it focusses almost entirely on fighting the big boss, which bores the shit out of me.

On one level I started playing, and it took all of a minute to get to the boss. I thought to myself, "already?" The boss was a giant worm that lived under the ice and it took copious amounts of ammunition to destroy it. Once it was slain I began to proceed across the ice field where I had fought it and another giant worm popped up. Just like the last one, except that I had very little ammo left and no weapons where handy. I died time and time again trying to defeat the second worm until I finally went online for a hint. Here was the hint: you only have to fight the first worm, the others you just run past.

THIS was the trick the player was supposed to figure out? You are SUPPOSED to fight these creatures until you get so bored and frustrated you just say "fuck it" and run away from them? What sort of head-up-the-ass idea is that? In total there are something like 5 giant worms, but unlike the first one, the others you can just "run away from". When you get to the other side of the field you explore for about 30 seconds and then find a new boss to fight. A completely different (boring) battle where you fight this same enemy over and over until you figure it out, and then, the level is over. Are you kidding me? So you can sum up this level like so:

1 minute exploring, fighting hordes, a half hour fighting a giant worm and figuring out you have to run away from its brethren to move on, 30 more seconds exploring and fighting hordes, another 15 minutes figuring out how to defeat a chick in some battle armor. Essentially the whole level is just two big boss battles. This redefines boredom. It would be as entertaining if you had to walk, real-time, for 45 minutes across a barren ice plain to get to the end of the level.

Your character depends on "Vital Suits" for much of the game. This is basically like power-armor or a battle mech from mech assault. A big walking robot you climb inside of and drive around. As you wander you can find ammo and upgrades for your suit, as well as thermal energy. But unfortunately, the game is pathetically episodic. After defeating the big boss, instead of being allowed to wander about and gather up scattered weapons, upgrades, and ammo, the level is just over. When the next level starts you may or may not have a vital suit, equipped with whatever the game chooses to give you.

I played this game through about 60% of the way and became too bored to finish it. It didn't matter how hard the boss battles were. I didn't want to fight them, it was just too boring.

I have to point out that Halo was one of the greatest games of all time and basically had no boss battles whatsoever. There were portions of the game where the hordes themselves were so efficient or prolific that you needed to learn new tactics to defeat them, but not because the creatures acquired special powers. As a result, what you had to learn was basically good battle tactics based on the lay of the land and what was available to you, not "where's the magic spot I have to shoot a million times to defeat this new giant creature I will never see again?"--i.e. what you learned had some applicable value later in the game. Further, it was largely open ended. A mission would not end until you chose to end it, and you could wander about forever and gather up goods.

CAPCOM has been making boss battle games for years, and these guys seriously need to find a new idea.

8.4

3.0

Dead Rising:

Also from CAPCOM, Dead Rising suffers from some of the same mistakes as Lost Planet, and some whole new ones. Here's a new idea, you are trapped in a shopping mall infested with the living dead. Wow, what a revolutionary idea... a veritable Dawn of the Dead setting with a Dawn of the Dead storyline where the zombies are just like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. The game actually includes a disclaimer that any similarity between it and Dawn of the Dead is purely coincidental... my ass.

That said, once you get in the mall you will find killing the zombies interesting for about 5 minutes. After the 5 minutes, you might as well take the game out and put it away. It will never get any better. Every now and then you will come across a new way to kill the zombies, but since they are largely just lurching bags of skin and bones, it's not exactly challenging. The variety of ways in which to mutilate the animate corpses loses its novelty quickly. Further, the supply of zombies is limitless and they appear out of thin air. Clear out a section of hall, wander away, and then come back, and the zombies you defeated are gone and the hall is full of zombies again. In this way, the game suffers from the same problem that Destroy All Humans did... insanely repetitive gameplay. Note to game designers everywhere, I can't believe I have to tell you this but, mindless repetition is not entertaining, it's effing boring.

Once the novelty wears off, the game simply devolves into a series of episodes, and in most cases these are "go find the live humans, and escort them to safety". The live humans are pathetically hopeless, and will basically stand around and let themselves be eaten, and often won't follow you when they should. And this is entertaining, how? Add to this an enforced time limit on missions and on the game (yes I'm not kidding) and it makes for yet another "chore posing as entertainment". I mean jesus, how do you make fighting for your life against an army of the undead boring? Hire CAPCOM, apparently.

As if this weren't bad enough, you carry what amounts to a cellphone and you constantly receive phone calls on it from the mall's janitor, who tells you what missions are available. If you don't answer he will call incessantly. If you do answer you get a few seconds of reprieve before he starts calling again. Nothing like fighting a horde of zombies while your phone is ringing.

CAPCOM being CAPCOM, this game also has its share of boss battles, but the bosses... are humans? They aren't zombies, they're just bad guys, and they are ridiculous. I fought one guy who was not wearing any sort of body armor and was not one of the undead. The fight took like 20 minutes and I put dozens of bullets into his abdomen with a pistol. And then he escaped by running away and climbing a rope. WTF?

Beyond the issues of boring or poorly thought out gameplay, this game has severe technical flaws which detract from the enjoyment even more. Saving is thankfully, not checkpoint-based, but is area-based, which is even worse. You have to be in a specific location to save--a bathroom. And the bathrooms are not easy to find in the mall (just like in real life). As a result you have to wander, sometimes for several minutes or more, fighting zombies all the way, when you need to save and quit. That's just fucking stupid. Instead of making the save points be clearly marked locations right in the main hallways, they are tucked away and hard to find. Stupid beyond stupid.

And here is the stupidest thing of all. You can't play this game without a high definition television. Note that it doesn't say this ANYWHERE on the game packaging or materials. In order to know what you are doing you have to be able to read text which appears in such a small font it is essentially a blurry smudge on anything but a high definition TV. You therefore cannot follow instructions, complete missions, or receive other important game information. It is insanely stupid beyond belief in that there is a ton of room onscreen, and this problem could be easily solved simply by making the text bigger. The first time I played the game I was using my upstairs TV which is not high-def and it was hopeless--I could not read the mission instructions. Later, after getting my HDTV repaired, I tried the game again and was able to read the instructions finally, but this did not make the game any more fun to play.

So there you have it, the germ of a good idea ruined by game designers who frankly, should get out of the entertainment industry.

So those are the new games which I'm not playing anymore. Boss Planet and Ass Rising. And I am ever so done with CAPCOM.

Holy Moly! It's C-C-C-Cold!

Abacquer — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 10:18:48 -0500

Stay indoors please, the coldmeister is on a rampage. Wind chill temps reported this morning were -17°F in Fitchburg, and -21°F in Worcester. ::everyone who uses Farenheit goes BRRR!:: For you Celsius types, that's -27°C and -29°C. ::everyone else goes BRRR!::

I'm sorry I didn't write anything all week. Work has been alternatively crazy and dead (my project is in it's final throes, where I am officially off the project, but as last-minute issues are found, I get pulled back in.) At present there is no new project to put me on so I am on the bench. Which is sometimes good and bad.

On Wednesday for example I had a whole bunch of things I wanted to write about. I had my downed trees removed, some politicial issues had me pissed off, I had some xbox games I wanted to post reviews for, some new Indie music to talk about, some movies to talk about, and some other random items. I was completely unassigned at work so I figured that I would write a bunch of things.

But I barely had my desk cleaned off when I got one of those emergency calls and I was sucked back in. When I was finally freed up again, I simply was in no mood to write. Everything I had wanted to talk about seemed unimportant and all I wanted to do was relax.

Blogging doesn't relax me, apparently.

Then on Thursday my kid woke up sick and so I've been looking after her between handling issues for work and working out of the house.

Anyway, I hope things will settle down soon, and I apologize to anyone who was disappointed that I hadn't added anything. My good friends have been busy on their blogs, so I invite you to peruse my blogroll at left and read examples of interesting content, rather than my rambling pointless blather.

Best thing I read all week was an article by an atheist mother on the wonderful blog Atheist in a Mini Van. Her daughter was annoyed by a teacher who gave her class a ten-minute "pop essay" assignment. The assignment was "What do you want for Christmas?"

Why would she be annoyed? Well duh, not everyone celebrates Christmas, and it's presumptuous of the teacher to just ask all the students in the class (including the Muslims, Jews, and atheists) to write about what they want for the teacher's religious holiday.

So that is what this young girl wrote about, that and her own atheist leanings, and the sad state of the poor. It was a wonderful essay, remarkable for the kid's age, and I encourage you to read it. Needless to say, a number of wacko fundies have commented on the article to communicate their Christian love for the atheist Mom and her daughter, by telling them they are going to Hell and whatnot. Assholes, the lot of them.

The teacher is definitely a mixed bag. She had the sensitivity at least to recognize that this young lady is observant and talented, and gave her an A+ on the essay. On the other hand, though, after class she told the girl that she couldn't possibly be an atheist because the ability to care for other people's feelings was not an atheist trait, but instead was a Christian attitude. So the teacher's both presumptuous and ignorant. Not an atheist trait... what a nitwit.

XBOX 360

Abacquer — Thu, 28 Dec 2006 14:10:10 -0500

My wife got me an XBOX 360 for Christmas, which was an insanely cool gift to get. Now it's just a matter of figuring out which games to play. A lot of people point me toward GameSpot as a source of information. IMHO GameSpot is a great source of hype, but I have trouble taking their reviews very seriously. Some games seem to get props which upon play are clearly undeserved.

Some examples? How about NeverWinter Nights 2 for the PC? I have been playing this here and there throughout December as time allows. It's a pretty fun game, but it is also the buggiest RPG I've ever played. It is insanely easy to trip on bugs in this game, and yet, as near as I can tell, the bugs go unmentioned. You would think that the fact that picking a certain lock and going through a certain door at the wrong time will basically lock off an entire region of the map to you permanently, would be a somewhat relevant piece of information. No recent save? Sucks to be you. GameSpot gives this game an 8.6 out of 10. They rather ironically rate it as "stable".

What I find is, the closer a game is to the top of the GameSpot rating system (theoretically, a game rated 10.0, don't know if there has ever been one) the more likely that the rating is accurate. But this accuracy tends to fall off rather rapidly as you move downscale. I take this as a desire to artificially elevate game ratings. And why not? Their site is covered with ads from game companies, and game companies would rather see the virtues of their games extolled rather than their flaws criticized. I find the following chart accurately converts between how I would rate a game, and how GameSpot would rate the same game:

So for example, if GameSpot rates a game as somewhere between 9 and 10, in actuality it could fall anywhere between 8.1 and 10. Or it could just mean that I'm overly critical. In which case, tough, I pronounce myself correct anyway. Being overly critical means that only the best will appeal to me, and therefore my "system" of rating games is better.

The real problem with a rating system which artificially inflates game ratings is that it is repeated by other gamers, leading to a phenomenon I have noted among my friends and acquaintances. I don't think anyone has ever told me that a game was "fairly decent". No. In casual conversation, games seem to be divided into the following categories: sucks, or awesome. Awesome seems to be generally anything rated 7.5 or higher at GameSpot, and sucks is everything else (allowing for the particular likes and dislikes of the person being asked).

Because of the conversational rating system as I have been able to discern it, I am likely to find awesome games which are pretty mediocre, or sucks games that aren't nearly that bad. Trying to keep all this in mind when attempting to decide what games to get is difficult. And sometimes I forget and operate under the assumption that a game everyone is saying is awesome really is awesome... usually I end up disappointed when that happens. Given that, I recommend renting games or trying them out at in-store displays before you buy. That way you'll know what you are getting into.

Or you could read my overly critical opinion. Here's what I've tried out on my xbox 360 thus far, and how it rates, from best to worst:

GameSpot	Me	Review
9.6	8.5	Gears of War: Gears of War is a pretty good shoot-em-up game. If you liked Halo, Halo 2, Half Life, or Doom, you will like Gears of War. Is it not the end-all be-all uber FPS gaming experience of all time that it is continually billed as. But it's definitely worth the purchase price. Game saving is based on checkpoints, which is a frownie because it means that you are going to go through a lot of annoying repetition as you try to beat levels... especially in those places where there is a long time between checkpoints or a cinematic (hit X to skip the cinematics by the way, you're welcome.) Also, there's no feedback as to how you are doing against an enemy. An opponent seconds from death looks and behaves identically to an opponent which is at full health. Too many movement actions are governed by one button, and as a result I constantly found my avatar diving into cover when I didn't want him to, which was particularly annoying when he chose to duck into cover on the side of a structure facing the enemy!! Better than Doom, not as good as Half Life 2.
9.0	7.2	Perfect Dark Zero: If you are a big fan of the Perfect Dark series, perhaps you will like this game. If (like me) you find the Perfect Dark series of games pretty unimpressive, you'll find this fits right in with the others. Yes it's on the xbox 360 so the graphics are nice (well sort of nice... why do the character models look so damn bad?) But for the most part I just found this game irritating. At times it tries to be Splinter Cell, but gives you no usable feedback about how stealthy you are being. At other times it tries to be a classic FPS, but features opponents which are as annoying as they are unrealistic. In the very first mission you have to fight guys wearing jet packs that cause them to rapidly and constantly bob up and down in a manner that would make ANYONE wearing such a device so sick and disoriented that they would puke all over themselves and fall out of the sky. As with Gears of War, there's no useful feedback about enemy health. You may be fighting a huge flying attack craft with your pissant rifle. You empty clip after clip into it without seeing any indication of damage right up until the ship explodes. Meh. Also, WTF is it with games lately where characters can't jump? Oh, I can't get over this 12-inch high barrier... I'll have to go around. Jesus. I enjoyed Tomb Raider: Legend more than this game.
7.9	5.3	Chrome Hounds: Just like MechAssault, except that it isn't good at all. Once again you are running about in big robots and fighting bad guys in tanks, other robots, and on foot. The graphics are quite lovely (this is the 360 after all) but the game drags on incessantly at an incredibly slow pace. MechAssault mechs are far preferrable to ChromeHound mechs. I think there's been an effort to make the experience of driving around a huge robotic war machine more realistic, but at the expense of game play. There's no use of waypointing, which makes navigation annoying, and many weapons seem to take forever to reload. This is the sort of game you may eventually finish, but you will probably only play one or two missions at a time before putting it away to do something else. It's just not engaging in the least.
8.1	5.2	Condemned: Criminal Origins: Here's a game that tries to be scary and instead puts you to sleep with its mind-numbing repetition and pointless restrictions. There are few set actions tied to buttons in this game, and as a result, you are likely to not try things because you aren't aware that your character can do them. Walk up to one narrow opening and the game might say "Hit (A) to climb through" but with any other opening nothing happens. So in some areas you'll wander about forever waiting to step into the magic zone that tells you about some other action your character can perform in just that spot. Another annoying feature is an inability for your character to carry more than one weapon. You will find many locked containers and doors that require specific weapons to open (crowbar, fire axe, shovel, sledgehammer) and since you dropped the shovel 5 minutes ago, you'll have to wander all the way back and find it if you want to get through this locked door which is magically resistant to the fire axe you are carrying. While you can only carry one weapon, you can carry multiple pieces of evidence-collecting equipment, of which the game will always select the correct one for the situation at hand, even when it isn't at all obvious. In other words, this game is stupid beyond belief. I may actually finish this game someday, but it isn't likely, as there will probably always be something better to do.
5.9	3.5	Dead or Alive Xtreme 2: Notice anything missing in the title of the sequel to Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball? If you said "volleyball" you're right! While the original DOAX featured a reasonably decent volleyball game along with the constant celebration of boobies, DOAX2's volleyball game is much weaker. There are a number of things wrong with it, but most of all it is now almost impossible to tell where the ball is going. There are a number of new activities on Zack Island (waverunner racing, footraces, tug of war, and "butt battles") along with the lounging, shopping, gift giving, casino betting, and volleyball, but with a variety of minigames there is a dilution of developer talent, and all of the minigames have suffered as a result. As with DOAX, the developers spent all their time on the boobies. The character meshes are very, very good, and the bathing suits are very pretty, but clearly these developers need to spend some time around real breasts, because they've gone too far in DOAX2 and have basically "ruined the mood". While the eternally gravity-defying endowments of the characters in DOAX required a hefty suspension of disbelief to enjoy, in DOAX 2 it's just impossible. The developers have tragically modified the "soft physics" which affects how the breasts move, giving them the ability to move independently of each other, which is fine, except that they simultaneously have changed the boobies to behave like bags of flubber causing them to do things which just don't happen in real life. When a woman throws her left fist in the air in triumph (does that even happen?) her left breast does not spend the next fifteen seconds gyrating around ridiculously. And if it does, get her to take her shirt off and let that kitten she's got stuck under there escape before it suffocates. Rent this one once so you can laugh at the opening cinematic which is perhaps even more ridiculous than DOAX's, but otherwise give it a miss.

Circuit City -- Eternal Assholes

Abacquer — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 23:39:30 -0500

Sorry for the inflammatory nature of that title, but I want to make sure this is noted. I was walking through a Circuit City store today as was appalled to see this abomination on the shelf:

Just in time for Christmas! A good wholesome game to teach your kid about the end times in which you either get Jews, Catholics, Atheists, Muslims, and other folks to convert to your Dominionist Christian ideology, or you murder them in cold blood on the streets of Manhattan. What fun!

You may recall I wrote about this repugnant abortion of a game some time ago. I reiterate that there is nothing remotely Christlike in its message.

The Circuit City in Leominster, MA just lost my Christmas dollars. I urge you to also take your holiday spending elsewhere.

All Quiet on the ULev Front

Abacquer — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 06:08:08 -0400

Sorry friends, been busy these last few days. Here's a short recap of what's been going on in my life...

Me and the Skeleton Detective

Abacquer — Mon, 24 Jul 2006 11:17:06 -0400

So it's the beginning of day three and I am utterly relaxed. I've had a very pleasant time playing video games, watching movies, and reading. When I wandered into Barnes & Noble the other day I was delighted to find not one but TWO books by Aaron Elkins that I had not yet read...

Daddy, Where's My Karaoke Game?

Abacquer — Sun, 23 Jul 2006 19:00:00 -0400

You know it's very simple... when you take the game out of the XBOX, put the disk back in the case it came out of. That's all there is to it... no rocket science involved. Because when Dad goes into the living room to grab a game you want to bring with you somewhere, he doesn't look inside the case to make sure it is in there. He shouldn't have to. Hopefully being 200 miles from the Karaoke game disk will bring this lesson home... because it is one I am tired of repeating.

Attention Sony -- Racism is Not a Great Marketing Strategy

Abacquer — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 14:59:35 -0400

Or maybe it is. After all it's garnering Sony a lot of attention. Negative attention, of course, but attention nonetheless. I'm referring of course to Sony's ad campaign in Eastern Europe for its new model of the PSP (PlayStation Portable) which will be available with a white outer casing, as opposed to the traditional black outer casing...

Magic Online -- A Philosophical Wrangle

Abacquer — Sun, 25 Jun 2006 17:54:05 -0400

I mentioned in an earlier article that I wanted to write about this, so I guess now's the time. If you had told me 2 years ago that I would become an avid MTGO player (that's Magic: the Gathering Online) I probably would have said you were crazy. And I would have been wrong. Nonetheless getting into MTGO has been a decision I've had to wrestle with for a number of reasons...

Beyond Belief... Lies Insanity

Abacquer — Wed, 31 May 2006 14:09:44 -0400

Fundamentalism is pretty scary. Anybody nutty enough to kill a person just because they don't believe in that's person's particular fictional superbeing should be locked up for the benefit of all mankind. And yet Dominionism (the belief that Christians have a divine mandate from God to dominate the Earth) is alive and well among America's Christian population, and we really should sit up and take notice. Due for release in October 2006 is "Left Behind Games" latest offering: Left Behind -- Eternal Forces. A video game in which Christian soldiers are called upon to raid the streets of New York City where they must convert or kill liberals, moderate Christians, Catholics, Jews, homosexuals -- pretty much anyone who doesn't fit into the dominionist Christian worldview. Yeah you heard that right. Here. In America. Melting pot of diversity? Or cesspool of intolerance? ...

Movie Review -- BloodRayne

Abacquer — Wed, 31 May 2006 10:01:43 -0400

I picked up the BloodRayne Director's Cut DVD last week and watched it the same evening. Rayne, the bitchy and beautiful dhampir (half-vampire) who slices up nazis and evil vampires in the BloodRayne video games (BloodRayne and BloodRayne II by Majesco) is such an interesting character that I had been really anticipating the BloodRayne movie right up until I discovered Uwe Boll was directing it. I figured that would pretty much be the kiss of death for it. But I decided to give it a chance and went out and got the DVD anyway...

Further Proof That I Kick Ass

Abacquer — Mon, 08 May 2006 13:17:19 -0400

Okay, I just couldn't resist that title. Check out this Scrabble game I played last week against a higher rated player on the Internet Scrabble Club...

Silent Hill -- Movie Review

Abacquer — Wed, 26 Apr 2006 17:21:11 -0400

So a couple nights ago I ran out to see Silent Hill at a local cinema. It's the first time I've been to the movies in I don't know how long. I had a great time...

Hyundai Buys Porsche

Abacquer — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 21:34:37 -0500

Just kidding, but along the same lines, it turns out that Dell is going to buy Alienware...

Introducing QI, KI, ...

Abacquer — Mon, 06 Mar 2006 14:12:39 -0500

The Internet Scrabble Club has finally updated their dictionary. And largely because of this, I was able to defeat a player with an 1100+ rating today...

With Microsoft, Early Adopter = Beta Tester

Abacquer — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 09:37:24 -0500

When the original XBOX came out, I bought one almost immediately. Within a week it was going on the fritz, often being unable to read disks. Turned out that many of the early models had substandard or defective DVD drives. Six months later I bought a replacement unit which magically had no trouble all. With Microsoft, it pays to wait. So with the advent of the XBOX 360, I've been in no hurry to purchase one...

She's Baaaaaaaaaack!

Abacquer — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 12:19:57 -0400

Eidos Interactive took advantage of Microsoft's X05 event in Amsterdam this week to hype the forthcoming release of Tomb Raider: Legend on Microsoft's platforms. Along with unveiling a teaser trailer for the game, the publisher announced that both the Xbox 360 and Xbox versions of the game would ship simultaneously in spring 2006.

-- gamespot.com, Eidos dates Lara Croft for Xbox, Xbox 360

Peter Jackson has a Halo?

Abacquer — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 08:47:48 -0400

I loved the Lord of the Rings trilogy as rendered by Peter Jackson, he's clearly a very talented movie maker. And apparently he has a thing for rings, because his next big project is a story that takes place on a ring-world... the movie adaptation of the video game Halo (best game ever.) Needless to say, I'm psyched, because Halo is a great game with an interesting storyline, and Jackson makes great movies. I have great hopes for this film, and will definitely see it in theatres. Thank heavens he snapped this one up before Uwe Boll got his hands on it!

I Love G4 TV

Abacquer — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 11:00:00 -0400

It's great for background noise when you're working on something else, and very entertaining to watch in it's own right. I'm referring of course to G4 Video Game TV, the channel specifically for gamers. I don't get to watch it often, but I almost always enjoy it...

Playing for Keeps

Abacquer — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 08:00:00 -0400

I have seen video games so engrossing they will suck you in for hours at a time, maybe even days... (Civ, anyone? How about Halo? Halo-2?) But there is one variety of video game that seems more addictive than any other, and this is the net-enabled games like MMORPGs or online shooters. I've seen people lose their jobs and lose their ability to function productively because of the pull of games like these. (EverQuest springs to mind, also World of Warcraft.) But now, from Seoul, Korea, comes the first ever (to my knowledge) case of someone playing online games continuously until dying...

Oddworld

Abacquer — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:43:23 -0400

I am spending most of today playing Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath on the xbox, a bizarre game from EA Games...

Hey Butthead, Get in the Car

Abacquer — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 11:00:00 -0400

I've been playing this XBOX game "Mercenaries - Playground of Destruction" by Pandemic (same folks who made Destroy All Humans). I didn't have high hopes for it but it turned out to be pretty fun actually. You're a Merc taking contracts with a number of different factions fighting in Korea (there are the South Koreans, North Koreans, Allies, Russian Mafia, and the Chinese). I've been enjoying myself up until this latest mission where a really annoying bug is ruining the experience for me...

Moron Goes After Sims 2 for Indecency

Abacquer — Sun, 24 Jul 2005 07:00:00 -0400

You probably heard about the gratuitous sex scene discovered in the game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, if not, the basic story is this...