Archive for category gaming
Uncharted 2 just blew my mind with the train scene
Last night, I played a scene in Uncharted 2: Among Thieves where I had a long gun battle along the top of a freight train as it ripped through the jungles and snowy peaks of Nepal. This scene was absolutely mindblowing in every way. Not only was the train very well designed, but every bit of the environment that I raced through was spectacular. The train started off in the jungles, went up to a lengthy tunnel and finally shot across the snowy peaks and lakes of the high mountains. I never saw the same scene twice, but it clearly was designed to be dynamic and let me take my time on the train.
My only regret with this scene is that I didn’t have enough time to take in the landscape while moving through these gunbattles and I was unable to take screenshots. I’ve looked around online for some screens of this scene and had some trouble, but I did manage to locate a video!
This train scene takes the title of most awesome train scene in a video game, previously held by Timesplitters: Future Perfect. I enjoyed the action in Timesplitters more, with the time travel and helping past/future versions of yourself, but the stunning scenery in Uncharted 2 more than makes up for that.
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves – First Impressions
Uncharted 2: Among Thieves released yesterday to amazing reviews and as someone who enjoyed the original, I simply had to pick the game up. This game truly deserves the reviews that it is getting. It is one of the best action / puzzle / platforming games that has come out in a very long time. The environments are absolutely gorgeous, the dialog is well done and the cutscenes feel more cinematic that any game I have played. The game plays very much like the original Uncharted, with you playing Nate Drake as he travels through various locations, climbing and shooting his way past obstacles. While I didn’t finish the original game, I did enjoy it quite a bit and am very happy I picked up the sequel.
The things this game has done right are the lighting, environments, cutscenes, animation and voice acting. The shadows are beautifully done and really enhance the already spectacular environments. At the moment, I am running along the rooftops of a Nepalese town and every now and then I get a chance to see the whole city from above. This is amazing every time I see it. Each building is detailed and the view is spectacular. Standing on top of a hotel roof while looking out at all the houses, markets and temples, plus the tree covered mountains and lake in the distance, is something to see. This scene came after an already amazing sequence in a Turkish city and the jungles of Borneo. Not only are the locations beautifully crafted, they are also quite varied.
The cutscenes, animations and voice acting are also very well done. Unlike most games I have played, these characters look, act and speak like real people. The cutscenes aren’t “good, for a video game”, but just plain good. People talk naturally and move about while talking. They don’t stare unnaturally at each other and don’t always wait for someone to stop talking before speaking. They give a good story much more life to it by being realistic. The story itself is well done, starting off with Drake near death after a train crash on a snowy mountain, and then backtracing his story of betrayals and backstabbing to lead up to where he is and what happened. The pacing is superb, constantly feeding me new bits of information about Drake’s story.
The annoyances of this game are a sometimes difficult camera and weapon management system. The camera is usually just where you need it to be, but on occasion I have to fight to get it in place, which can be particularly awkward if I am also trying to move and jump. Weapon management may have been artificially harder than it should be due to my drinking while playing, but it seemed often annoying to pick up ammo or pick up new weapons. During a gunfight, with so much on the ground, I would run around trying to gather more ammo but occasionally pick up a new weapon instead and find myself quickly out of ammo with that new weapon. I lost one big gunfight in Borneo trying to get ammo before the next wave, only to accidentally pick up the wrong weapon.
Even with its few annoyances, this is a fantastic game that starts off the 2009 holiday season in an epic way. I don’t know if any of this season’s games can top this one, but there is no shame in being inferior to Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, because this game is truly Game of the Year material.
When did it suddenly become acceptable to delay a game days before release?
NOTE: This was originally meant for an October 2, 2009 publish date, but I accidentally hit ‘Save Draft’ instead of ‘Publish’ and so it is being released over a week late.
Three times this year, a game was suddenly delayed only days before the release – Jumpgate: Evolution, Dungeons and Dragons: Eberron Unlimited and now Alpha Protocol. When did this become acceptable practice? How did you not know that the product wasn’t ready until this close to the ship date? Did you suddenly realize that you compeltely forgot to start work on the game?
All three of these games were ones that were on my radar, but by missing their release window, they’ve now lost my attention. Jumpgate and D&D were both MMOs that could’ve caught me and got me into it prior to my World of Warcraft binge lately, and Alpha Protocol was set to be the appetizer to the holiday season on the consoles. Now that I have WoW taking all my MMO time and I will soon have the main course of the holidays, all three of these games are no longer something I will buy. Not out of anger or defiance, but because none looked that good, and were merely well timed decent games.
More to the point, however – why is this happening so much lately? Alpha Protocol was due on next Tuesday, but suddenly gets delayed until sometime in 2010? The dev team must’ve known several weeks ago that this window was unlikely to be reached, so why delay the news? Gamers are used to delays, it happens all the time, but this recent style of delay just aggravates me. Maybe I should refuse to buy out of anger, because this is a shitty move on their part.
D&D was only delayed a few weeks, so that one wasn’t as bad, but Jumpgate has no excuse. A week or two before the launch of an ambituous MMO, it is suddenly delayed indefinitely. I can’t understand how that happens. Even from my perspective as a programmer, I can’t understand. A delay of a month is acceptable, but to suddenly push it back to who-knows-when?
I hope this trend stops and I hope it stops real soon.
Scribblenauts / Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story First Impressions
Last night, I picked up both Scribblenauts and Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story for the DS. I only spent about 45 minutes with each game, but both of them impressed me quite a bit in those 45 minutes. Scribblenauts is an all new experience for me, whereas I was a fan of the Mario & Luigi series of RPGs before picking up Bowser’s Inside Story.
The first game I played was Scribblenauts. This side scrolling game has you playing Maxwell, and you use a notepad to write words, which turn into objects on screen for Maxwell to use. The goal of each level is to get a Starite, either through solving a puzzle or through directly reaching the Starite. The objects that you create are the draw of the game, however, since Scribblenauts’ library is believed to be over 22,000 words. With my experience last night, only two words were rejected. One is a proper noun (Obama) and the other is a copyrighted word (Tazer). All other words that I put in created an object (key, sandwich, time machine, mech, tank, flame, pistol, shotgun, rock, superhero, hippie, smoker, smoke, wind, flame, dragon, dragoon, ninja, and a lot more). The only one that gave me an unexpected result was smoke. I was intending to write smoke, and at the last minute decided to give smoker a shot instead just to see what would happen, and I got a bird, rather than a person with a cigarette.
Each of the puzzles are quite different from one another, and within each one you are trying to use as few objects as possible. If you ignore the ‘few objects as possible’, I doubt any of the puzzles are hard at all, but staying within that rule requires some thought. I also found some odd solutions to puzzles that amused me. In one puzzle, I was to rescue a kitten from a tree and give the cat back to the girl. Instead, I summoned a superhero who did the work for me. It worked exactly as planned. Sometimes, I would just screw around for no real goal. On a puzzle that had me catching a butterfly, instead I made a time machine, went back to medieval Europe, summoned a mech and killed all of the knights.
The only annoyance I’ve had thus far was the overly long and text heavy tutorial. I felt they could’ve trimmed that down by 80% and still given me all I needed. I hear complaints about controls, dealing with mis taps on the DS screen causing unfortunate movements, but I only briefly experienced this before taking an extra second on each tap to make sure I am precise. All in all, the game is very fun and very amusing. It is a great pick up and play game that will work well on my lunch breaks.
The other game of the night was Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story. Like Scribblenauts, it had an annoying intro/tutorial, but it was mitigated by rock solid dialog and very clean artwork. This game series has constantly impressed me and BIS is no exception. It follows up Partners in Time and Superstar Saga, which is an offshoot of Super Mairo RPG in a way. It doesn’t seem to change much from PIT, but this is a good thing. The controls, moves and menus are all very well done.
One of the things about this game that always impresses me is the localization team’s efforts. The dialog is witty and culturally applicable. It isn’t just any old RPG storyline, it is a story that is delivered in an always amusing fashion.
The only questionable decision (thus far, this could change) seems to be the side scrolling portions. I was really hoping for some sections of the game to be very reminiscient of old Mario games, but this feels more like regular BIS with a different background set and limited range of movement. I hope that as I progress, the levels evolve to give me nostalgia of the old days.
Both games are fantastic, however, and I will be discussing them on tonight’s recording of Jarate Sandvich, which will broadcast live at 7pm PDT on either ustream or stickam, depending on what kind of technical difficulties we have.
The holiday gaming season is upon us
Today is the start of the holiday gaming season, for me at least. Every year, we gamers can look forward to a massive dump of games in a brief period, and the first of the games that I am looking forward to comes out today – Mario and Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story.
For me, the holiday lineup is fairly decent, although some of these games I will have to wait for reviews before committing any money.
September has Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story for the DS on Sep 14, Scribblenauts for the DS on Sep 15 and Halo: ODST for Xbox 360 on Sep 22. Halo: ODST is the only one of those that is not an absolute must-buy for me. I will wait on reviews and hopefully snag a demo. The DS games will be my first DS games since Pokemon: Diamond a few years back. Also in September is the Forza 3 demo on September 24 for the Xbox 360.
October is the month that really kicks this season into full gear. Alpha Protocol comes out on October 6, Uncharted 2 follows it a week later on Oct 13, the following week brings Borderlands on Oct 20 and the final week of the month has two great titles – Forza 3 and Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, both on Oct 27. Alpha Protocol and Borderlands are the two that I will wait for reviews on. This month has PS3 edging out 360 – PS3 has Ratchet & Clank and Uncharted 2, while 360 only has Forza 3. The rest are cross platform.
November, the final month of the great games, rounds things out nicely with Bioshock 2 and Dragon Age: Origins, both on Nov 3.
I will have to start scaling back my World of Warcraft time so I can play all of this. Luckily, the first must have that will take up my home time isn’t until Uncharted 2 on Oct 13, so I still have a month of World of Warcraft left. The DS games I will probably be playing at lunch.
I’ve been a bit addicted to WoW lately
It’s now been over a week since I updated this site, and about as long on any tweets, and the reason is simple – World of Warcraft. After Will got the game recently, my group has been more focused than ever on having some fun in that game. We are mostly currently in our early-mid 20s, hunting through Redridge Mountains and frequently running dungeons. This character (Eromar, my Draenei Shaman), is my first character to really spend a lot of time in the instances. We’ve already run Deadmines and Wailing Caverns, and plan to run Deadmines again tomorrow and Blackfathom Deeps on Monday.
Playing a Shaman is a bit of a new experience for me. The only previous characters that I got above 15 were a Warlock, Warrior and my current main, a Paladin. The Shaman plays like none of those, instead focusing on totems and buffs to enhance the group. It is a lot of fun and I’m thoroughly enjoying this group. At the moment, we have a feral Druid, protection Warrior, combat Rogue, holy Priest, enhancement Shaman and retribution Paladin. We also have a few other characters in this range, but that seems to be our main group. However, I think the retribution Paladin will be making a Warlock soon to provide crowd control and debuffs. There is also another Rogue in our group of friends, but he is in his late 30s, so we don’t group with him yet.
These dungeon runs gave the game a whole new life for me. I’ve run dungeons before on my Paladin, but not many, and not with a reliable group of people. Knowing everyone in the group and running dungeons is a lot of fun, and it is an experience I wish I would’ve done years ago. The game is easy to solo, and fun that way, but running dungeons is much more interesting. I can’t wait until this group gets higher and more dungeons open up. The end game dungeons are a hell of a lot of fun.
Shadow Complex – First Impressions
Shadow Complex came out on XBLA arcade yesterday, and I eagerly picked it up. I am a few hours into the game and am loving what I have experienced thus far. This is a side scroller in the vein of Super Metroid, and it does a very good job of living up to that game. In the first few hours, I’ve already collected a decent amount of upgrades, gotten a new weapon, and explored a decent chunk of this large underground complex.
The game is running on a 3D engine, with the camera angle always to the side to keep the action moving as a 2D side scroller. However, the level design is full 3D, and sometimes the enemies will be in the background. I was a bit afraid of this idea, since it seemed like aiming would be difficult, but the use of the right stick to point your gun is actually very intuitive. It picks up exactly where the orthogonal controls of Super Metroid left off – the left stick moves you around, the right stick points your gun, and the right trigger fires.
The movement is mostly fluid (I have occasional issues with manuvering around ledges), and the weapon variety is acceptable. I have gotten a pistol and a submachine gun, along with a grenade launcher. The pistol and submachine gun feel very similar except for rate of fire and ammo capacity. I wish the weapon disparity was a little more pronounced, but I’m still early in the game.
All in all, it is doing a good job of being a retro side scrolling shooter in the modern gaming world. At only 10 hours long, I should have it finished within the next few days, letting me get back to Madden. At only $15, this game is a steal.
I will probably skip the second impressions on the game, though, since it is a short game. I will write up a final impressions article once I have finished the game.
Recent gaming – Madden 10 and Shadow Complex
Over the weekend, I decided to go grab Madden 10. This is the first Madden game I’ve owned since Madden ’93 for the Sega Genesis, so to say I’m a bit rusty is a hell of an understatement. I got it because I’ve been jonesing for a new game and there isn’t much on the horizon. Will is a pretty big Madden fan and recommended I give the demo a shot and I enjoyed it quite a bit. Even though I’m not a football fan (and this won’t make me one), I am a gamer and this is just a well done game.
I started a franchise as the New Orleans Saints and finished the preseason last night. My first few games were pretty miserable, but I didn’t start saving my record until I won at last one game, but now I’ll just take what happens, win or lose. I ended the preseason 3-1, winning my last 3 games (4 if you count me forgetting to save after my second match against the Texans).
I’m slowly getting my bearings on all of my plays and what to do in each situation. I have a ways to go before I could begin to approach Will’s skill and put up a decent challenge in a head-to-head match, but I’m enjoying it a lot. Some old gamer friends of mine are giving me shit for playing the evil Madden, but I’m not really concerned. I don’t even really care that it is a sports game. Sports is half athleticism and half strategy, and since there is no physical exertion from me sitting on the couch, it comes down to just being a good strategy game.
However, I will have to pause on it for a few days – Shadow Complex was released this morning and I’ve already picked it up and put some time into it. I’d like to do a first impressions for it, but that will have to wait a bit longer. I only played for 15 minutes, skipping all cutscenes, on the easiest setting. Tonight, I will pick it up again and go through it a little bit more thoroughly. I’ll do a first impressions later this evening once my first impression has solidified.
I will say that I enjoyed what I played. The movement is smooth, the level design is fantastic, the feel of the game perfectly carries on the torch of Super Metroid (something I don’t think Symphony of the Night was able to do) and the combat aiming is nicely done. It seems about as quickly paced as Super Metroid in terms of combat (not like the high speed Gunstar Heroes that I recently picked up again), and it looks like there is a lot to the game, as far as powerups are concerned.
I’m really looking forward to getting home and getting back into that game. I plan to focus on it pretty intensely for the next few days, before going back to Madden 10 until something better comes along. I may go back and pick up Fable 2 – a game I had a mild interest in, but never grabbed.
Jarate Sandvich #16 was chock full of drunken debauchery
Last night, I recorded episode 16 of Jarate Sandvich (although I’m wondering why 14 and 15 aren’t on winehousefactory.com yet, and in the RSS feed, 15 isn’t up) and the episode got interesting as the four of us got increasingly drunk. Our choice of beers may have been a bad call, since 3 of the 4 were strong drinks – Stone Ruination IPA, Samuel Adam’s Double Bock and Dogfish Head Ancient Ale. The fourth, and the only reasonable drink, was Samuel Adam’s Cherry Wheat. The Ruination was surprisingly delicious. I guess my palate is finally starting to accept the taste of an IPA. I didn’t much enjoy the Ancient Ale, but the Double Bock was amazing.The Cherry Wheat was also quite good, although by the time we got to that beer, we were well trashed.
The Double Bock is to malt what Mighty Arrow is to hops – the bottle says 1/2 lb of malt per bottle. In comparison, the Porter being brewed by Will, Dan and myself will have 1/10 lb of malt per bottle. This Sunday, when we bottle the porter, I plan to bring over some ice cream and a pack of Double Bock to make some Double Bock floats – just like a root beer float, but better and with alcohol.
Also during the episode, we talked about the Team Fortress 2 classless update, Madden 10 and the Steam Indie Games Pack.
World of Warcraft – Bargas is now on Proudmoore
As of last night, I switched Bargas, my level 65 paladin, over to the Proudmoore realm. I originally went to Stonemaul due to a friend being on there, but I have not grouped with him since I was level 33, and mostly just solo or find random groups. A few other friends are all on Proudmoore, which is a non PVP realm, and I finally decided to make the move. It cost $25 and took about an hour to complete (much less than the 3 days Blizzard said it could take), but I think it was well worth it. I don’t like playing on a PVP realm – it is just no fun to be hunting and questing and suddenly get ganked by a level 80 who is bored.
This group that I am going to join now has a 70 Deathknight, 60 Hunter and 62 Paladin, which is much better than the Stonemaul realm, where I had almost nobody to group with. This might get me back into World of Warcraft much more solidly, since the fear of ganking is now gone.