Gamertag: CyberKnight

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #71

2012-01-22T23:59:00.001-07:00

2011 Recap (Thanks, Netflix)

CyberKnight and McJeepers review the past year, their hopes for the year to come, and their annoyances with everyone's favorite streaming media service.

—CyberKnight

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #70

2012-01-12T08:10:00.001-07:00

Beacons, invite etiquette, and endless banter

…and we’re back. This week we wrap things up with our final cast of 2011 covering topics such as XBL’s new beacons, invite etiquette, and the endless banter of a bunch of guys podcasting without a script.

—MidnightGhostGF

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #69

2011-12-31T18:32:00.003-07:00

Cotton Candy, Jobs, and Modern Warfare

Well it’s that time again, I’ve procrastinated long enough, so let’s get on with the show… In this episode Jeeps gives us a look into his wacky ice cream flavors, we talk about the Steve Jobs biography, and discuss midnight releases including the release of MW3.

—MidnightGhostGF

Cleaning the Xbox 360

2011-12-17T15:36:00.000-07:00

My nephew BAW101KillerR is staying with us while he goes to film school nearby (which is really only fair, since my wife stayed with his family when she was going to grad school before we met). He made a comment that he thought my Xbox sounded exceptionally loud when it was on, and not just when the DVD drive was running.

Not long ago, the case fan on my top-of-the-line (in 2001) desktop computer died, and in the course of trying to fix it, I opened it up, took it apart, and vacuumed out ten years' worth of dust. The fan still needs to be replaced, but at least it's now more effective in its weakened state without all that dust gumming up the works. I decided it might be prudent to give the 360 the same treatment. My 360 is just over 3 years old, which puts it out of warranty for even the red ring of death, so I had nothing to use by opening it up.

Click the picture to see the full Flickr set of the Xbox in various stages of disassembly

Taking it apart wasn't too difficult, as there are detailed instructions all over the internet that describe the process, and I had long since acquired the correct screwdriver bits in my many years of opening the original Xbox and laptop PCs. The picture to the right shows where most of the dust was found. This is the side of the Xbox opposite the hard drive — the right side if you set your Xbox horizontally, or the bottom if it's standing vertically. There was a bit coating everything inside, and some on the fans, but on the whole, not too much (especially compared to the 10-year-old computer). I vacuumed out the vent holes and used up the last of my can of compressed air blowing out the cooling fins. It didn't do much to help my issue with the DVD drive refusing to open unless there's a disc already in the tray (in fact, I've found I have to give the eject button a little extra pressure before it even acknowledges it), but in the process, I did discover the manual eject hole for the DVD drive, so I can now open it easily if it does get stuck again. Regardless, the console does now run much, much more quietly.

I suspect this could be more of a concern to those who have their consoles up on end. The area under and around my 360 (as well as the top) gets a fair amount of dust settling on it, and since most of the air intake seems to happen on that end that would be facing down, that would have the 360 sucking up dust off the ground. Although perhaps it would be worth a study to see if more dust gets sucked in facing the ground vs. facing sideways sucking it straight out of the air.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #68

2011-11-30T21:00:00.000-07:00

Northern Warfare

Furgus and CyberKnight are joined by special guest Sven XC to talk about Modern Warfare and Forza, along with the typical random assortment of Geezerly topics.

—CyberKnight

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #67

2011-11-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

McJeepers in a Cat Suit

Our long lost cast member McJeepers joins MidnightGhost and CyberKnight for a chat about the upcoming deluge of AAA titles, Jeepers' favorite Facebook MMO, and anything else Ghost can find on the internet for us to talk about.

—CyberKnight

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #66

2011-11-20T20:10:00.001-07:00

Choke the Timmy

CyberKnight, MidnightGhost, and FireMedic discuss bad betas, good trailers, and the pros and cons of real-life game rage. Recorded 2011-10-08

—CyberKnight

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #65

2011-10-09T08:04:00.000-06:00

Wait for the Credits

We’re back and further off the rails than ever before during my time with the cast. This week Furgus is disappointed by the credits at the end of the Gears of War 3 campaign, we meet Klyde99and find out that I stink as an interviewer, learn that Furgus is an Enchantress, and that we could have titled the cast “Mouth full of Crackers” among other things. Oh, and we actually work in some gaming talk as well….

So sit back, relax, and prepare yourself for 100 minutes or so of Community Cast goodness. Also, make sure you stick around after the end of the cast for some special treats mixed into the the music I choose to round things out.

—MidnightGhostGF

In case you forgot, Games on Demand sucks

2011-09-26T21:15:00.001-06:00

A few months ago, Microsoft was getting ready to release a new Xbox disc format. Supposedly, the new format provides some more room on a game disc for developers. But, as they typically do before a new feature release, they wanted to get some volunteers to test it in the field before releasing it to everyone at large. So, they took sign-ups for a preview program. I like getting new features early, sometimes just so I can get my update before the servers are hammered with everyone else trying to get theirs on release day; so I signed up.

I was surprised that the disc they sent me to test was no less than Halo Reach. Although I already had a retail copy since its launch, my disc had developed a small crack on the inside hub, so I was happy to be able to use this alternative disc and not risk using a damaged disc in my Xbox.

It worked well enough up until last week, when 343 Industries released an update to Reach. I was surprised when I tried joining another player and saw a message telling me that they had an updated version of Reach. I received no notice to update, nor did the game kick me offline for having a non-updated version of the game. I soon discovered that, while the "format preview" copy of Reach was similar enough to allow achievements and online multiplayer, it was different enough that it did not get the same update distributed to everyone else.

I went back to my retail disc, updated the game, and started hoping again that the disc wouldn't shatter in the drive.

The next day, I was surprised to get an email from Microsoft. They apologized that my "format preview" disc would not get the update, and to make amends, they sent me a copy of the downloadable version of the game.

Not only did they give away a AAA title for a feature preview test, they apparently considered it important enough to continue supporting long after the preview program was over.

Although this was an unexpected pleasantry, it did call something to my attention.

Here is a portion of the Xbox Live Marketplace page for Halo Reach. You can see the price is listed at $59.99, the retail price of the game at launch. This copy of the game does not include a disc or case (obviously), or a manual (but you can download it online). It also does not permit you to resell, trade, loan, or borrow the game. Nor does it let you play it on any console in your own home except the one you first download it to, unless you sign in to Xbox Live on that other console; i.e., you can't give the disc to a roommate or other family member for play on another console unless it is connected to the internet and you sign on there.

Here are a couple product pages for the physical copies of the game, from Amazon.com and Wal-Mart. The game is being sold for $35.95 and $39.96, respectively, with the ability to get free shipping. It comes with a disc, which can be installed to the hard drive or USB on your Xbox console, but the disc is required to play the game. The game can be resold, rented, traded, borrowed, or loaned, and it works on any Xbox in existence, anywhere, online or not, playable by anyone.

To add insult to injury, Amazon also has the Limited Edition of the game for $54.99, which includes an exclusive DLC code for the Elite playable character, some in-universe collectibles, and Dr. Halsey's journal (notes about the creation of the Spartan program), in an ONI "black box" case — for $5 less than the digital download version.

It just underscores what I've said many times before. Digital downloads offer a less valuable product, at a price that doesn't change with the free market.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #64

2011-09-05T09:25:00.005-06:00

Hurry up, Halo is calling…

The Community Cast is back and while it’s a slightly abbreviated edition this week we still cover actual gaming topics a little more than usual. This week you’ll hear us talk about a number of items including the fact that Jeeps may have a Leia costume as well as discussions about Borderlands 2, the upcoming re-release of Halo CE, and Call of Duty’s XP event in LA.

—MidnightGhostGF

My lack of skill, in picture form

2011-09-03T13:20:00.001-06:00

I came across this picture, and I think it perfectly sums up my enjoyment of video games.

The picture comes from the original demotivational poster site, Despair.com. Click the picture to be taken to their product site. This is an unsolicited post.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #63

2011-08-23T21:47:00.002-06:00

It’s been long time

Well, it has been a long time, since June I believe for some of us but we’re back to bore like never before. This week the cast includes Cyber, Medic, and yours truly MnG along with Jeeps blowing in from the south. This time around we cover a range of topics including DRM lunacy, some anniversaries of note, Activision reporting big earnings, and how the SCOTUS became a friend to all gamers this summer.

—MidnightGhostGF

Why 'always on' is an 'instant off'

2011-08-09T22:56:00.000-06:00

The news has come out that Blizzard's upcoming Diablo 3 will require a persistent internet connection, even for single-player play. Their excuse is that this is necessary because of all the integrated online features in the game (including an auction house, where players can buy and sell in-game items for real dollars). We've seen before where companies use this requirement as an anti-piracy measure as well. In any case, the result is the same: I will not be buying it.

I have seen comments how this is no longer a big deal. Just about everyone has a constant internet connection anymore, and if anyone knows how to run servers so they're always available, it has to be Blizzard.

But that's not good enough.

Just recently, I had issues where my internet connection was going up and down quite a bit. Granted, this isn't normal behavior, and a service call from Comcast fixed this, but it does present the possibility that I could get kicked off of my game because of a bad internet connection. Indeed, as we were recording the Geezer Gamers Community Cast this weekend, my internet connection hiccuped and our Skype session was disconnected, twice. Even a fully-functional broadband connection isn't 100% stable.

And that's the wired connection. Chances are, I'd have to play this game on my laptop, as I doubt my 10-year-old desktop has the horsepower for it. And my laptop connects via wireless. That only compounds the instability issues.

Of course, there are other problems where bandwidth caps are concerned. True, game data uses very compact data packets by design, but requiring constant communication with a server on the internet will drive up data usage. Plus, if you go over your cap with Comcast, you'll find your internet service completely cut off, which shoots a hole in the "everyone has a constant internet connection" argument.

Even if you have absolutely no internet issues at home, requiring a constant connection means, simply, you can't take it with you. I used to bring my laptop with Diablo 2 on vacations to the in-laws, where persistent internet is less of a sure thing than in my own home. The need for a constant internet connection means I could not do the same with Diablo 3, thus this requirement reduces the game's value for me.

There are two possibilities here. Either I am just an "edge case", one of the truly dwindling number of people who doesn't have a 100% stable internet connection everywhere they game, and no one cares about me, so my lost sale is meaningless; or I'm right, and the people denying that it is a problem are either the "good edge cases" or are in for a rude awakening when they find their legally purchased game is constantly forbidding their play.

So, for now, it's a no-sale, and that way it will remain until after hackers figure out a way to remove the "always connected" requirement and restore value to the game.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #62

2011-06-29T10:32:00.000-06:00

Mad as Geezers

The cast of Mad as Hell Gamers Radio (who, through the magic of Skype, sound as if they’re broadcasting from an underground cavern) visit with CyberKnight to discuss all things E3.

—CyberKnight

This one was recorded and edited by me. ;)

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #61

2011-06-05T20:05:00.000-06:00

The band is back together

Hot off of the presses from last night we’re back this week with the full band including Cyberknight, Furgus, Firemedic41, McJeepers, MidnightGhost, four fried chickens, a Coke, and some dry white toast. This time around we give you a little bit of an extended edition where we throw out some predictions in time for E3, talk some LoU, Call of Duty Elite, plus a lot more gaming talk, and Furgus takes an opportunity to get some things off his chest.

Just in case anyone wonders after listening, the “technical difficulties” we encounter part of the way through was Skype deciding to stop our call for about 20 seconds.

—Midnight Ghost

Portal 2

2011-06-05T16:02:00.000-06:00

The original Portal was just a side project done by a couple developers and thrown in with Valve's Orange Box collection. Despite its rather low-key release, the innovative game play, quirky humor, and stellar voice acting made it a huge hit. The game was released as a stand-alone on Xbox Live as Portal: Still Alive with additional puzzles, and fans still wanted more. Valve originally announced the coming of a sequel in an innovative way, by releasing a title update to the PC version of Portal that embedded codes in the sound files of in-game radios and altered the game's ending so the protagonist's escape ended with her being dragged back by an unseen hand.

Portal 2 was released as a stand-alone game, developed by an entire team with all new puzzles, new elements, and the introduction of a two-player co-op mode. All these new elements come together and make the sequel a HUGE SUCCESS.

Note: while I will try to avoid details of the story and end-game, some of the items discussed here may be considered spoilers. I avoided media and reviews of the game before I played, and I enjoyed the reveals as I hit them in-game. Decide for yourself if you want to read on.

The single-player story mode re-introduces the original game's player character, Chell, who is being held in a hotel room-like chamber in suspended animation, periodically awakened for "exercise" and "culture" sessions (walking around the room once and staring at a picture on the wall for a few seconds). The final time, she is awakened by Wheatley — a personality core brilliantly voice-acted by British comedian Stephen Merchant — who tells Chell of a catastrophic failure in Aperture Science and offers to drive Chell's room to safety. As the facility crumbles around you, Wheatley drives your room on railed tracks to the beginning of the real game — the same "relaxation chamber" where you started the original Portal. As you leave the chamber, you go through several familiar puzzle rooms (now crumbling and overgrown with vegetation), re-acquiring the portal gun and re-learning the basic mechanics. Eventually, Wheatley unwittingly leads you to re-awakening GLaDOS, and the more advanced testing begins.

You go through GLaDOS's puzzles until Wheatley finds you an escape route, which eventually leads you far below ground to the long-buried chambers of Aperture Science's early days, guided by recorded messages from Aperture's first CEO, Cave Johnson. There, you learn of the long-forgotten experimental substances — a red-orange propulsion gel that increases your running speed, a blue repulsion gel that lets you bounce to new heights, and a white conversion gel that lets you apply portals to surfaces that normally wouldn't accept them.

The story and voice acting is phenomenal. I often found myself standing still and waiting to see all the dialog that GLaDOS, Wheatley, and Johnson had to say. The puzzles are interesting, although I found them to be a touch on the easy side. The puzzle elements were always right where you needed them, so while it sometimes was a trick figuring out how to put them together, it was rare to be so completely stuck where I didn't know what to do. I never once felt hampered by the controls or camera angles, though, which is a rare joy for a puzzle/platformer. I managed to finish the whole campaign inside of a week (although it was helped by a full sick day off of work, where lying on the couch playing Portal was the only thing I could really do). The biggest down-side, however, is, because it's a puzzle game, once you figure the puzzles out, there's little reason to repeat the experience. In a second playthrough, with nothing new to figure out, you just go through the motions.

In co-op, you and a partner play as two robots created by GLaDOS to solve special cooperative tests (the "Cooperative Testing Initiative"). Each robot is given a portal gun that shoots two distinctly-colored portals (red and yellow for one, light blue and deep purple for the other). The portals are linked only to each other (e.g., you can't go through a purple portal and come out a yellow one), so even with up to four portals in play at any given time, it's a lot more manageable than it sounds. Communication is vitally important in solving puzzles, and it is made much easier with quick tools for "pointing" to locations (so you don't spend 10 minutes trying to explain "which wall on the left" you're trying to point out), starting countdown timers (which are not subject to the slight lag of voice chat), and viewing your partner's point-of-view.

Again, the puzzles were pretty straight-forward. Knowing what to do was never an issue, even if the how took a bit of time figuring it out.

The real Achilles' heel of multiplayer stems from the biggest problem in single player, that it's just not as fun the second time around. In multiplayer, it's rare that you'll find someone who's at the exact same point as you (except when it was first released, and no one had played it yet). Which means you end up with one of two situations: one player is just leading the other through the motions, or they're trying to stay silent while letting the other player figure it out. It's a less-than-ideal situation. Figuring out a new puzzle together is the most fun, but it happens so infrequently, and those moments are only going to get more rare as the game is played more.

DLC has been announced for the game, which should increase its usable life, but only temporarily. Also, while Valve has a history of releasing DLC cheaply or free for their PC games, there is a very real possibility it will be free for other platforms and be forced for cost on the Xbox 360, like what happened for Left 4 Dead content last fall. Perhaps having the content on the PlayStation 3 at Valve's pricing will pressure Microsoft to ease up on their cost mandates, but we will see.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #60

2011-05-19T20:09:00.000-06:00

Only on a Geezer Cast

We’re back this week with episode 60 of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast. This week Cyber, me, and the ice cream man himself McJeepers touch on a wide range of topics including Skype, Jeeps’ love of Brink, the PSN Network still being down (as of the date this was recorded away), Lord of Ultima (come on, the Geezer Alliance needs more Geezers), and we hear how Cyber’s son really feels about the podcast.

—Midnight Ghost

On the front page

2011-05-17T19:32:00.000-06:00

I'm featured on the front page of Geezer Gamers! Well, it's not much, just my answers to a little questionnaire. I guess I'm getting my fifteen minutes of fame a few seconds at a time.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #59

2011-05-08T18:07:00.000-06:00

It’s all about Jeeps

Coming at you live via tape delay we give you the next installment of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast. This week we touch on a wide range of topics which, oddly enough, actually include gaming related talk. This week we also welcome back long lost cast member FireMedic41 thanks to Skype mobile, as he provided taxi service to his daughter. Also back is JanesAddicted along with the regulars including Cyberknight, McJeepers, and MidnightGhost with a fond “how do” to Furgus who couldn’t make it this week.

—Midnight Ghost

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #58

2011-04-23T23:52:00.000-06:00

I wanna shoot something

If we hadn’t recently used “The podcast about nothing” as a title it would have definitely applied to this cast. This week you get to listen to me, Furgus, and Cyber talk about…well…nothing. We touch on several non-gaming topics with just a sprinkle of gaming talk. I almost just released an unedited directors cut of the cast because we did some gaming talk “off-air” but I decided to polish things a little.

—Midnight Ghost

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #57

2011-04-04T20:04:00.000-06:00

Blame Flu for the puppies

After taking longer than normal to get the cast ready for public consumption, we’re back with an extended addition where we beat several topics into the ground a little more than usual…… Also, on top of the normal useless banter we get to know our special guest JanesAddicted who is the newest member of the Geezer Gamers moderator team.

Trash-talk the almighty EA and forfeit your games

2011-03-22T00:19:00.000-06:00

It's been a while since I've had a good rant about DRM, but sure enough, EA has come through with yet another reason why DRM is all about taking control away from consumers. A user on the Dragon Age forums had the gall to compare EA to the devil -- specifically, he was asking if gamers had sold their soul to the EA devil. Maybe more than a little inflammatory, depending on your point of view. A forum moderator decided it was ban-worthy, though, and banned the user from the forums. However, the moderator banned not only the forum posting privileges, but all access to EA's servers. This resulted in his copy of Dragon Age 2 to be unable to authenticate with EA's servers, preventing him from playing his legally-purchased, single-player game.

EA has since admitted this was an "error", apologized, and has made the necessary corrections to restore his access. However, it doesn't change the fact that we now know EA can disable your game, intentionally or not.

It's not bad enough that game companies want to lock down all access to a purchased copy of a game to one and only one person, even to the exclusion of other people in the same household. No, now they have the ability to block you from playing your game at all, merely for criticizing the company. (If the report is accurate, the criticism in question was really quite tame for the internet.)

Perhaps EA can be said to be following well-estabilshed precedent. Amazon.com — upon finding out copies of certain books were submitted to their Kindle store by people who didn't own the rights to sell them in the first place — remotely deleted all purchased copies from users' Kindles. In a software patent suit (which is its own kind of evil), TiVo complained that the DVRs Echostar sold to customers infringed on their patents, and a judge ordered Echostar not only to stop selling the devices, but to disable the devices already in the homes of customers. A similar case forced AOL to remove an MP3 player from their software (and push that removal down to customers via an "update") when sued by Playmedia. [source] Sony, when it learned of the (rather remote) possibility of someone using the "Other OS" feature on the PlayStation 3 console to hack the system and gain complete control of the hardware, released an "update" that removed this feature from all existing consoles.

In light of these examples, maybe EA's "accident" wasn't so bad. After all, the gamer still had their copy of the game, and there are likely hacks either in progress or already released that would let you get around the "phone home to play" requirement and let you play this purely single-player game when a connection to the mother ship is not available (either by banning, bad network connection, or EA's decision to turn off support for the game on their servers' side). However, to the honest, paying, and perhaps not incredibly tech-savvy (or at least not enough to know where to find — let alone how to make — a "don't call home" patch) customer, the result is the same. You don't buy a product you can use anymore; you buy the promise that you should be able to play the game for some "reasonable time" — a promise that can be broken at any time with no recourse.

And if that doesn't bother you, I have some promises I'd like to sell you….

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #56

2011-03-07T21:05:00.000-07:00

We have a sound bite for that

It’s time for the next installment of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast. This week Cyberknight makes his best effort to never have to host again, Jeeps runs out of things to say but refuses to let me add in some sound bites for him, and some where in between we discuss everything from gaming news to the space shuttle.

Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth

2011-02-22T21:30:00.001-07:00

Star Wars: The Battle for Hoth is a tower defense-style game originally released for the iPhone and ported to the Windows Phone 7 platform. It's a fun game in concept, but technical issues and an inconsistent difficulty curve make it more frustrating than fun in practice.

The game is based on the battle that starts the second Star Wars movie (not the fifth, the second), and is fairly standard for a tower defense game. You place your rebel forces around a mostly-open level to destroy Imperial units as they attempt to make their way off the right side of the screen to attack the unseen rebel base. Enemies range from Imperial probe droids to the mighty AT-AT. By digging trenches and strategically placing units, you channel the Imperials around the level to expose them to as much rebel fire as possible. However, the Imperial units have their own arms, and they will take shots at your units to weaken and destroy your defenses.

My personal bane of tower defense games are the units that are both fast and heavily armored. The units that fulfill this role in SW: Hoth are the armored AT-STs. Many a level went by perfectly up until a final wave of a mere pair of AT-STs walk past a screen full of units and reach the end intact. It's more than a little disheartening to see your best defense come to naught. These units are introduced after only a couple levels, meaning you have to plan for them on nearly every level. And planning for them can be difficult when you have to spend a good percentage of your "command points" re-building units that are destroyed by attacking Imperials.

The game has serious control issues. It seems to be unable to tell the difference between a tap and a swipe — or, at least, it takes everything as a swipe. It's as if, unless you manage to tap a single pixel, the game assumes the multiple points you touch are actually part of a movement, not a tap. Nowhere was this more apparent than on the level select screen, where only the lightest pinpoint touch would select a level instead of scrolling the level list by a pixel or two. (A title update eventually fixed the level select screen, but gameplay controls weren't improved.)

On the flip side, when you do perform a swipe, the game sometimes registers a tap. This happens frequently when panning the board or pinching to zoom out — at the end of the swipe or pinch, if one of your fingers happens to rest over one of your units, you will likely find that unit selected, centered, and zoomed in upon. Imagine the frustration when, every time you pinch to zoom out, the game immediately zooms back in on a unit you didn't want to select.

Generally, it has all the fun (and sometime-frustration) of a standard tower defense game. The sounds and cutscenes directly from the movie add to the flavor. The difficulty of some of the enemy units (and their ability to destroy your units, sometimes in a single shot) give it a harsh challenge. But having to fight the controls makes it a very difficult game to deal with.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #55

2011-02-18T19:46:00.000-07:00

The Podcast About Nothing

This week Firemedic was away and the inmates ran the asylum….right off the tracks. What started as the “I can’t drive 55″ episode turned out to the be show about nothing…. There is inane banter aplenty and Furgus learns that podcasting is better when your mic isn’t on top of you head.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #54

2011-02-08T19:35:00.006-07:00

Please check your receipts

It's a new year and the community cast crew are back and better than ever…. Well… we're back anyway. In the first episode of 2011 we learn you should be careful which paper you use to print your coupons, that Roombas suck, and we could talk about nothing for hours if Medic would let us.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #53

2011-02-06T13:25:00.000-07:00

The Lost Episode

Community Cast 53 is the last installment of 2010, which due to old age and senility took two months for us to release… In this episode the usual cast of characters, except for a missing Ghost, bring you another hour plus of inane banter with some gaming and community talk sprinkled in the mix.

Fable 3

2011-01-20T21:30:00.001-07:00

Fable 3 is Lionhead's newest installment of the Fable universe. While it is a step up in graphics and story, the game play leaves a lot to be desired.

The story of Fable 3 is one of your standard good vs. evil fares. A force of darkness is coming to take over the kingdom, and your king brother is running the kingdom into the ground with a merciless hand. Your goal is to take over the ruling of the kingdom, and then run it as you see fit to prepare for the epic battle.

Unfortunately, the game is far from perfect. While certain elements were employed to allegedly increase the immersion of the player, they only end up getting in the way of what could've been an enjoyable experience.

Here is a small sampling of the bugs and annoyances I've encountered personally while playing Fable 3:

Relationships are a chore. To manage your relationships, you have to interact with a person a couple times (each interaction is fairly long, silly, and somewhat disturbing — a little amusing the first couple times, aggravating and boring by the 150^th). Then you do some kind of quest that is invariably: a) travel to another town, b) find/deliver some item, and c) return for your "reward". And the villager may not stay happy too long anyway, unless you keep repeating the process. (Except kids. I haven't seen a kid do anything but get more unhappy. Their quests are invariably "give me a toy", but I have not yet seen it actually improve their mood, and I have actually seen them get less happy with a positive expression.)
No real map. The map tables are extremely high-level, showing very little town detail. It is impossible to navigate using that map, requiring you to memorize the layout and paths of every town in order to truly get where you want to go (difficult unless you happen to be able to set a quest target in that town, so the gold trail can guide you; very difficult if your real-life sense of direction is crippled as it is). The map also only identifies the major towns. If you want to, say, return to the Ossuary in Mourningwood, unless you remember exactly where it was for the one quest you did there, you have almost no chance of finding it again.
Speaking of Mourningwood, it gets tiresome every time you travel there to have to go through a long path full of hobbes. (It's arguably easier to fast-travel to Bowerstone Industrial and backtrack on foot, but I end up walking in circles before I find the path back, since I don't have that town memorized.)
Sanctuary issues. When Jasper would talk to me, quite often he'd tell me there were "new" items in the shop. Actually, he just meant there were items I haven't bought yet — and no amount of pushing would make me spend money on a dog costume for my hero.
Of course, that all stopped when Jasper decided to stop talking to me altogether. Lionhead eventually released a patch, but that only got Jasper talking for a few minutes. Then he not only stopped again, but I lost my inability to interact with him (fairly useless anyway), and the D-pad quick links to the Sanctuary rooms stopped functioning (or even displaying on-screen), making the Sanctuary slightly more of a chore to be forced to use for weapon switching.
Disappearing wife. Eventually, you can marry your childhood sweetheart; but after the final battle for the kingdom (which I got through saving the entire kingdom), she disappeared. I had her in a house in Bowerstone Market, but there was no sign of her. The map showed she was still there (with the heart indicator on Bowerstone Market); and when I highlighted our house, it says she is there with a gift for me. I eventually selected the house and was able to choose "Move family", which I did — moved them right to the castle. There is still no sign of her, though.
Disappearing civilian. I have a relationship quest where I'm supposed to return an item to a person in a particular town. That person no longer exists in the town. I don't know where he went (I left, got the item, and came back almost immediately). I can select the quest, but when I get to the town, no gold trail appears.
Network issues. I joined someone's multiplayer game at one point. I'm guessing we had some network issues involved, since we were in an Xbox Live party and I could only hear about half of what he was saying. One attempt ended with characters on my screen stuck in place — my hero was frozen, but other characters were walking in place. His screen was apparently stuck on a "Loading" screen I never saw. The second attempt ended with both of us going to loading screens, and then me staring at a solid black screen (with the occasional cricket chirping noise, indicating the scene I couldn't see was at night) and his loading screen showing cog wheels almost frozen (moving slightly every 20 seconds or so). I had to exit to the dashboard to break out.

It's rather disappointing that my strongest impressions of the game are the problems I've had. I really enjoyed Fable and Fable 2, but Fable 3 has been really hard to fully enjoy with the constant little bugs and awkward design.

Halo Reach

2011-01-15T12:15:00.001-07:00

Reportedly the final installment of the Halo franchise from Bungie, Halo Reach was released last fall to record-breaking numbers (that would be broken themselves by the next Call of Duty installment, released soon after). So, how is it?

The campaign was worthwhile, but surprisingly, not too interesting. The story follows a team of Spartan 3s (with a single Spartan 2 member) stationed on Reach, the military center of the human race. The team are called to investigate a possible incident involving the insurgent factions that were harassing the colonies in the years preceding Halo 1, find that the Covenant are attacking, and attempt to fight off their impending doom. (If you've so much as heard of the title of the first Halo novel, The Fall of Reach, you know this is going to be futile.) Having read the books, I was interested to see how this story fit in the Halo universe as a whole.

The novels showed the Spartans as professional military teams that depended on each other and worked like a cohesive unit. The Spartan 3s were a little less so, since they were not raised by the military from childhood, but there was still a sense of a bond shared by Spartan team members. Halo Reach's Noble Team, however, didn't seem to share this same bond. As a Noble Team Spartan, I expected to have this same bond with the other members. However, the AI-controlled characters seemed indifferent and aloof, not just to me as a new member, but even to each other. I never got the sense that any of the other Spartans cared for each other, no matter what happened. When characters started dying, it just didn't seem like it mattered to anyone. After the excellent storytelling of Halo ODST and the characters' varied and interesting personalities, I was rather disappointed.

The overall plot was decent, although I had a hard time fitting it into the universe as I knew it. I'll leave the fanatics to analyze the plot, but there were things that just felt "wrong". Could Spartan 3s actually be on Reach? Maybe. But Dr. Halsey, creater of the Spartan 2 program, actually seeing one? That didn't seem to fit with her character in the books, who was unsure of their existence until she ended up on Onyx. Her dismissal of the only Spartan 2 on Noble Team (Jorge), too, seemed out of character with the Halsey in the books, who cared for her Spartans like a mother. And the final mission, bringing Cortana to the Pillar of Autumn, didn't sound right. Wasn't the Autumn already in orbit as part of the fight, with Cortana on-board? I might have the exact sequence of events a little off, but the lack of clarity was distracting.

Campaigns are nice, but what really gives a game longevity is multiplayer, and that's something Bungie does extremely well. Although Xbox Live had been out for a year before Halo 2, it was that game that took the service from a novelty to a necessity. Even eight years later, we're talking about how other games' multiplayer lobbies fail to live up to that standard. Bungie's next two Halo games only improved on this, and Halo Reach is no exception. Right on the game's main menu, you see a list of all people on your friends list who are currently playing, what friends they're playing with, and their current status (in lobby, playing a match, etc.). You can select one of the friends and see more details: who they're playing with (not just your friends), what game type they're playing, and the current score and time remaining. If their party is set to "friends" or "open", you can enter a "join queue", which will add you to their party as soon as their current game ends.

The game play is fairly similar to Halo 3, although dynamics are changed with the introduction of armor abilities. These are roughly similar to the equipment of Halo 3, but instead of finding one and using it once, it's something you spawn with and can use any time (with a recharge time between uses). You can choose your armor ability as part of your spawning loadout (which often includes different sets of weapons). These armor abilities can radically change the way the game is played. Jet packs turn the game vertical, armor lock can turn a run-and-gun fight into a tense standoff, and active camo encourages care and stealth — and that is only a sample of the abilities.

Game types are similar to the standard Halo fare, although some games that had to be created with custom rule sets (like "Rocket Race") are now implemented as standard game types, with even more options (e.g., force players to be in vehicles). ODST's firefight game mode has been expanded, with support for matchmaking, a single-player mode, and more, allowing players to customize even the types of enemies that appear in each wave. Forge has been improved almost to the point of a full level editor. A new Forge World map has been included, which has a variety of terrains and locations. Where "forgers" had to use insane tricks to place adjacent objects seamlessly or to suspend objects in the air, Reach's Forge allows players to push objects through each other or suspend them as supported, selectable options. As a demonstration of the powerful feature set, Reach was shipped with on-disc maps that were completely built in Forge World.

Reach includes a new leveling system that was popularized by Call of Duty. The game features commendations, which are awards that are earned by performing certain feats in certain game types (e.g., killing so many Covenant forces with a sniper rifle while playing Campaign missions). The leveling system is based on "credits", which are earned by playing games, earning commendations, or completing daily and weekly challenges (objectives determined by Bungie that, if you complete within that day or week, earn you a credit bonus). The total number of credits earned in your career determines your rank — thus, it is possible to only play Campaign and still "level up". (This rank is separate from your skill level, which is now completely hidden from the player and thus harder to exploit.) Credits can also be spent in the armory, allowing you to customize your Spartan with a wide variety of helmets, armor pieces, effects, and even voices used in multiplayer. (Spending credits does not decrease your "total earned" number, used to determine rank.)

Bungie has definitely improved on Halo in their last project. Although the campaign lacked the epic feel of Halo 3 or the emotional appeal of ODST, the multiplayer is a worthy successor for Halo 3.

Dara O'Briain on Videogames

2010-12-11T00:45:00.000-07:00

No real deep commentary here; just a comedian doing a routine about playing videogames. I thought it was too good not to share.

MAHG - Revenge of the Nanny State

2010-11-22T21:45:00.000-07:00

Contrary to a very popular belief, there is no law preventing the sale of "mature-rated" content to minors. So why are video games being singled out by a California law, now being reviewed by the Supreme Court?

Full story…

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #52

2010-11-09T21:15:00.000-07:00

Getting Kinect-ed

The latest installment of the cast you just can’t get enough of! The usual suspects talk a long time, and really don’t get anywhere with anything. Might have a few laughs in store for you though!

Controlling the Market

2010-10-30T18:51:00.000-06:00

The Xbox Live Marketplace is anything but a free market. I know I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating. It's also extremely unfortunate. Microsoft is generally a developer-friendly company. They have released tools for developing on Microsoft platforms and systems for free, including providing a channel for independent developers to distribute and sell their content on the Xbox 360 itself. But when it comes to running the business side of things, they can be ruthless, inflexible, and anything but accommodating.

Witness a recent release of content for Left 4 Dead 1 & 2. Once again, a developer who seeks to give away its content is refused the privilege. To prove the point and drive attention to the unfairness of the whole issue, Valve announced not only the release of the DLC for free on the PC, but they put the full games up for sale on their own store for under $7 apiece. Coincidentally, $7 is the equivalent for the price that the DLC was selling on the Xbox Marketplace. Although I don't play on the PC often and even have doubts that my machine will even run the games, I decided to buy both games on Steam — voting with my wallet, as it were — and save a couple bucks in the process.

Is it any surprise that Valve negotiated to get Steam on the PS3, so they can control their own distribution?

Not only are DLC prices an issue, but the ability to distribute updates is, as well. While Microsoft cites a desire to ensure the integrity of the Xbox system as a whole (Xbox Live included), the lengthy certification process has proven a barrier to deliver even free updates. Not only has Valve commented on this, calling the system a "train wreck" that's often considered the reason Team Fortress 2 updates have been few and far between (bordering on non-existent), but other developers are suffering.

Developer Uber Entertainment released a game for the Xbox Live Arcade this summer, Monday Night Combat. This game that is one part tower defense and one part class-based third-person shooter is what Uber considers a "service based model of a game", meaning they intend to continuously update the game to balance classes and fix exploits, and do so quickly. However, their most recent title update was submitted to Microsoft, where it languished in certification and the deployment queue for over a month, before Microsoft decided it was fit to release.

In news that should surprise no one, the game Samurai Warriors 2 — which I picked up for myself $6 over a year ago — still has the extra character pack available on the Xbox Marketplace at its original price of $30 worth of Microsoft Points. I only bring it up now, though, because I can finally say that the copy I borrowed from FireMedic41 over two years ago, I finally returned this fall.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #51

2010-10-23T02:29:00.000-06:00

Bathtubs and Banter

So kicking off the next 50 episodes, we continue to liven things up. We’ve got some cool extras in store for you now, so our long-time suffering listeners might actually get a laugh or two.

All six of us return in 51, as FireMedic41 attempts to keep things moving along. But with this bunch, it’s a lot like herding cats.

Bumper music provided courtesy of national recording artist Major Tom. Visit the band at MajorTomRocks.com!

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #50

2010-10-07T21:31:00.001-06:00

Our 50th Cast!!!

In our 50th episode we examine our humble beginnings of recording by candlelight in a shanty on the eastern seaboard (or well maybe not exactly right…). The shows hosts continue to develop as MidnightGhost is looking to be a regular too, and Furgus and ‘Jeeps rejoin us for a cast to remember. There’s chat about 343 statements, the awesome Stepto and the ban team, Kindle’s, and some cool gaming news with the Kinect.

We also talk about “the vacuum”, and “the mom”, some Pittsburgh Penguins fan stuff, and how this crazy podcast started and evolved into …well we’re not sure about what we’ve evolved into, but it keeps getting to be more fun!

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #49

2010-09-22T21:51:00.001-06:00

Reach Has Fallen

Halo: Reach is here and in this abbreviated Episode 49 CyberKnight, Bovine Piracy, and Firemedic41 offer their thoughts on Reach about 24 hours after its launch.

MAHG - Hands-On with Move

2010-09-19T20:26:00.001-06:00

CyberKnight gets his hands on a demo of the PlayStation Move at a local Wal-Mart, and compares it to the Wii and the Kinect.

Full story…

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #48

2010-09-13T19:28:00.000-06:00

REACHing for Answers, Smacktards, and Outtakes

Here in Episode 48, MidnightGhost from DTH joins us as we explore the deeper, philosophical meanings behind Internet anonim..anonon..whatever.!

Transformers: War for Cybertron

2010-09-04T22:39:00.000-06:00

The Transformers franchise has been in questionable hands lately. Michael Bay pumped out two movies that had all the style and class of a typical college frat party (which, incidentally, he included in one of the movies). The videogames released with the movies didn't do much to support the franchise, let alone break the stigma of bad movie-game tie-ins. Low review scores and a lack of interest from my friends certainly didn't motivate me to pick them up.

Naturally, when I heard that Activision was publishing a new Transformers game, I was initially skeptical. Although it wasn't going to be based on one of the awful Michael Bay movies, it still had the potential to be just another milking of the franchise name. One of the earlier interviews with developer High Moon Studios didn't help my opinion. When they said their strategy was to start out by making a good game first, rather than trying to make "a Transformers game", I was afraid I would see a generic shooter with Transformers skins, maybe some transforming abilities shoehorned into the gameplay.

As more and more interviews and preview videos came out, though, my opinion changed. High Moon set out to make a good game, and rather than shoving the Transformers universe into it like a square peg into a round hole, they took the franchise seriously as well, carefully molding the characters and the story. They decided to tell the backstory of the '80s cartoon series, and apparently they did such a good job with it that Hasbro adopted it as official canon.

The ultimate result, Transformers: War for Cybertron, is a Transformers fanboy's dream. The story fits in perfectly with the cartoon, showing the introduction of Megatron, his rise to power over the Decepticons, and how he gains Starscream as an untrustworthy second in command; and how Optimus (voiced by the one and only Peter Cullen) becomes Optimus Prime, bearer of the Matrix of Leadership and leader of the Autobots. The characters talk like an '80s cartoon, including Soundwave's classic synthesized voice and Omega Supreme's overly-dramatic two-word sentences. There are also more than a couple references to the 1986 animated film.

The campaign takes place on Cybertron, a mechanical world. It is very detailed and very robotic, very true to the source material. The Transformers geek in me was very happy with the look and feel of the world. Although, from a more generic, videogame-player analysis, it does make a lot of the environments look the same. It's something that, if you're not expecting, may disappoint you.

The gameplay works very well with the transforming characters. Transforming is handled very simply by clicking the left thumbstick (by default). The levels are crafted in ways that encourage using both modes (many wide open areas and ramps) so that many times, one might think, "I want to drive across here," and then, "I need to walk around here for a more tactical maneuver," and it is very easy and natural to flip back and forth from vehicle to robot mode to get it done. The levels are a little on the large side, but the ability to transform to a vehicle at-will and race across any distance means nothing ever feels so big that it's a chore to get through; so the world ends up being at once vast and manageable.

The game's difficulty curve is rather jagged. I found that there were many times the game would just decide, "You are going to die now," and in two or three shots, it would be so. I found that the final bosses were most often not the hardest parts of the game. This ended up working to my advantage, as there's a small glitch to the "complete the game on the hardest difficulty" achievement — if you've played through the campaign on a lower difficulty level, you can load up the last checkpoint of each chapter on the hardest, play just that, and get credit for the whole chapter. I didn't learn about this until I played through the entire Autobot campaign on Hard first, so I had many times where I had to pound through some very difficult encounters. Even on the easier difficulty levels, though, the game didn't make it too easy.

Health and ammo are not auto-replenishing. Some have said that auto-restoring health makes games too easy, but I've found the lack of it to be rather frustrating — one mistake, or one lucky shot from the AI, puts you at a considerable disadvantage not just for the rest of that encounter, but for every future encounter until you are blessed to find a health pack. Transformers WFC isn't too bad in this regard; energon cubes are frequent enough (and in plain sight) to limit the impact of a setback, but it's not overly-generous such that you'd never have to worry about health. Ammo is about the same. Although I rarely found myself out of ammunition, I often found myself low. It is more often that you'll find another weapon than you will a generic ammo crate, though, so you may find yourself forced to toss empty weapons a lot. On the plus side, this encourages you to try out all the different weapons; but on the minus side, it means if you have a favorite weapon, you might find yourself forced to choose between holding it empty and picking up a less favorable one that actually has ammo in it.

Co-op is done fairly well. The campaign features drop-in, drop-out, up to three players. (There are always three players on your team; the AI controls any non-human Transformers.) I've found, though, that it's actually easier to play the harder difficulty levels alone. Although your AI buddies don't provide much support, they also never die, meaning you only have to worry about keeping yourself alive. Also, all the energon cubes, ammo crates, and weapons are yours to pick up, as the number of random items does not seem to increase with more human players.

The game features an "Escalation" mode, rapidly becoming a new standard mode in videogames. You and up to three partners start a match (no drop-in allowed, which makes sense for the game type) and face wave after wave of progressively harder enemies. You earn energon (not health) by killing enemies, and this energon is spent at kiosks spread around the map. Kiosks dispense health, ammo, and weapons; and there are also doors that can be unlocked by spending energon. While each person earns energon independently, they can share their resources by depositing as much energon as they have — so, if a door takes 400 energon to unlock, player 1 has 200, player 2 has 150, and player 3 has 75, player 1 can deposit his 200 in, player 2 can deposit his, and player 3 can finish paying it off to open the door. Once a door is open, the path beyond often leads to kiosks with better weapons or items.

Multiplayer matchmaking has many different modes available. There are free-for-all, team deathmatch, king-of-the-hill, territories, assault, and capture-the-flag style modes. The game features a customizable class-based system similar to Call of Duty, where you can pick your basic class (scout, scientist, leader, or soldier) and attributes (specialties, starting weapons, even chassis and colors). Experience points earned in multiplayer games level up your class and unlock available weapons and "perks".

Multiplayer is, unfortunately, easily the most frustrating part of the game. The network code is not the most robust, so it's not uncommon to find your party split for no apparent reason. Although the game will claim to be "waiting for balanced teams", it doesn't seem to do much "balancing", as it tends to throw many high-level players together on one team. After a match, even if it is severely lopsided, it will often keep the players on the same teams, rather than splitting them up. Also, rather unfortunately, the online gaming population for Transformers WFC as a whole is extremely small. The game often reports an online population of less than a couple thousand players, and less than a hundred playing any one given mode. So the gamers you see are the "real fans", the ones who play the game a lot. You'll start to recognize their names by sight after just a few sessions. There is no host migration, so if the player chosen as the game host decides to quit, you are dumped unceremoniously back to the multiplayer selection screen (not the game lobby) — the message saying this happened "because the host quit" confirms this, different than a message suggesting a network issue ("connection to the host timed out").

Now, I've never claimed I was a good player. In fact, I often just plain suck. One of the reasons I stopped playing Call of Duty 4 was because I grew tired of kill:death ratios of 1:3 or worse. Unfortunately, Transformers WFC seems to take this to all new levels, as I consistently lead both teams in deaths and have kill:death ratios as low as 1:6. There are times I'm convinced the game has it out for me, when I will observably do twice as much with the same equipment to another player, fail to eliminate them, and have them kill me with half the effort. But whatever the cause, the result is the same: I'm dead, he's not, and I'm frustrated.

The rest of the game is stupid fun. When I'm playing Escalation as Jetfire (one of my favorite Transformers from my collection when I was a teenager), hit the afterburners to rocket away from a bunch of Decepticons, transform, and skid to a stop in robot mode in front of a kiosk to replenish my ammo before jumping back out to fight some more, I'm grinning like a thirteen-year-old geek playing with his toys. It really never gets old. If I can just suffer through the multiplayer to get my experience points (which, fortunately, you can earn without the kills, just not as quickly) to get the last few achievements and satisfy the achievement completionist in me, then I can get back to the fun parts of the game.

That is, before Halo: Reach comes out and dominates my game time….

MAHG - Used gamers are pirates now?

2010-08-25T22:28:00.000-06:00

"When the game's bought used we get cheated," says THQ, but you can't get cheated out of a sale that was never yours to begin with.

Full story…

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #47

2010-08-22T17:07:00.000-06:00

Jumping Sharks, Being Irrational, Purchasing Prestige

Bovine Piracy joins the cast as we get to know The Blokey, talk about franchises jumping the shark, discuss the new Bioshock game, and complain about hackers and modders.

Geezer Gamers Community Cast #46

2010-08-05T13:03:00.000-06:00

Red, Blue, Blue, Green, Red, Yellow, Orange…

With FireMedic41, CyberKnight, and starring special guest LauraLouny!

MAHG - Face-to-Face with Kinect

2010-07-27T16:37:00.000-06:00

I was finally able to test drive Kinect for myself recently, and I am finally able to give my own account and form my own opinion.

Full story…

Connecting with Kinect

2010-07-18T22:10:00.000-06:00

I am fortunate to live in an area not far from a Microsoft Store, and, being suddenly full of free time, I decided to head over there to check it out.

I walked in and was greeted by one of the retail sales grunts, who pointed out the 3D TV at the front of the store. She indicated that, not only was it being driven by a Windows PC, but the Xbox 360 connected to it was also 3D capable. Unfortunately, they didn't have a 3D game available for demonstration. I thought it was interesting, considering what a big deal Sony has made of hyping up their system's 3D capabilities, that the 360's capabilities don't seem to be getting any press.

I asked if the Kinect was on display, and she pointed to the back fo the store. I asked if there was an official price for it, and she said, without any hesitation, "$149." Is that an official confirmation of the price, or just a random employee answering a question without knowing the weight of what I tried to ask? Probably the latter, but I'm not hopeful about the former.

I made my way to the display area in the back of the store. A group of young kids, probably around kindergarten age, all in matching T-shirts, were taking turns playing the Kinect Adventures game that was presented at this year's E3. It was an opportunity to see how kids reacted to the new device, and, in general, the reaction was favorable. The kids seemed to have a good time. Some were more into it than others, but I don't think it was any worse than one might expect from a group of kindergarteners at any activity.

Once the kids were done, and as the Microsoft Store rep was ushering them out, I was able to walk up and get a close look at the device. Its black, shiny, slightly angled shell has a very similar look to the new 360. It's about a foot and a half wide, stands barely a foot tall on its stand, and pretty much looks exactly like its pictures. I actually think it looks a little smaller in person, which only means it'll be easier to place at home. Although it doesn't help the impression that it's way overpriced, when you can take one look at it and think, "$150 for that little thing?"

The Microsoft Store rep came back and asked if I wanted a turn. She started up the demo with a wave of her hand, and we played the rafting game. Almost exactly as the E3 videos, we raced down a whitewater canyon, steering the raft by stepping left and right and getting air by jumping in unison. Except we didn't seem to have much success. I think the left-right movement might've been hampered by my not wanting to run into the Microsoftie, so I was a little conservative. My jumping, it became apparent, was severely mis-timed. The game takes actual pictures of game play, and at the jumping moments, the Microsoftie was in the air when I was very clearly still on the ground. She had obviously had a lot more practice in knowing when to jump at the correct time, and the game knew it. The cynic in me would say she knew the limits of the system and how to "correct" for them, but there are just too many variables for me to identify the issue — was it that, was it that I was mis-reading the timing of the game itself, was the software not cueing my jump clearly, was it my own slower reflexes?

Next, a group of three older teenage girls arrived. I played the next game with one of them, the handcart race. Again, my lateral movement seemed to be a little under-accepted. I had more trouble moving left than right, and again, I'm sure that was due to my own hesitation in moving left so as not to slam into the other player standing there. But for making my avatar move to the right side of a handcart that's barely two avatar-widths across, it seemed like it wanted me to shift my own body two or three whole steps to the side. Is that a Kinect problem, or a software problem? While some people may say they're one in the same (if the games are crap, it doesn't matter how good the console is), I think it's an important distinction (not all 360 games turned out like Perfect Dark Zero, which wasn't bad but definitely wasn't the best the 360 would ever have to offer), and, unfortunately, it's impossible to say which is at fault. Again, I had a little issue timing my jumping, but my ducking was a little better.

I stepped aside after this game to let the other girls play. I would've liked to play more, to get more of a "feel" for Kinect, but I didn't want to hog the system. As I stepped aside, though, I realized that my heart was racing, and I was a little out of breath. I suppose it was a good thing I was taking a break. I make no pretense about being in any kind of healthy cardiovascular shape, but I was surprised at how much of a workout those two minigames had given me.

The two remaining girls stepped in front of the camera, and the console started up the "wall-ball" game, where dodge balls are smacked towards blocks until they bust. They were a little uncoordinated, which seemed to be a function of their own hand-eye coordination and not a fault of the game itself. This game moved a little faster, and it seemed to me like any input lag would be very pronounced in this demo. The Microsoftie kept encouraging the players to "swing earlier", which felt like a need to compensate for input lag (although, there were definitely times when the girls' own lack of coordination was clear in that they were physically swinging after the ball passed their avatar — could this be a candidate for being improved by 3D?).

I mentioned input lag, and I do believe it was there. However, I don't believe it was extreme. In the moments when I could see a 1:1 coorelation between the avatar and a human body (including my own), the lag was extremely slight — I'd say within a tenth of a second. It's visually perceptible, but barely. It wasn't nearly as bad as the Microsoft press conference, ironically, made it look (I'd almost bet money there was a video signal delay getting the display on the huge screen behind the presenters that made it look a little more laggy than what I witnessed).

For input calibration, there was none. A player walked in, and that was it. Now, the Microsoftie did "guide" people a bit. She was encouraging the kids to stand a little further apart. This could've easily been as much for their own safety as it was for Kinect's benefit (there's a lot of flailing around). She did, however, make the comment "not too far apart, or you'll 'disappear' from the game". Well, I guess that's only fair; the camera's not going to have a fish-eye field of view. One thing that did surprise me, though, was that when one of the kids' adult companions came and grabbed the kid's shoulder to give them a little tug to help pull them apart, the avatar extended its hand to the left, as if it identified the adult's hand and arm touching the shoulder as the kid's. It seemed like a bit of a tracking error that Kinect was supposed to not make (i.e. not get confused by a random distraction entering the camera range), but perhaps physical contact will throw it off.

The Microsoftie did mention that there was a bit of a "calibration" process where Kinect learns the layout of your living room, where furniture is and such. What it does with this information, I don't know; and how much of this information is important, I also don't know — will it get confused if my room is clean one day, and the kids have left their toys all over the floor the next?

So, all told, what do I think? Not much different than I thought before, to be honest. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was playing something much like a Wii, even if I didn't have a remote strapped to my wrist. I do think my kids will love it, seeing how much fun they have on the Wii whenever they visit their grandma. Technologically, it's impressive, how it identifies anyone who walks up to it and lets them play without any extra setup. I just don't know what to think. I'm a hardcore gamer, and it's not made for me; that much is certain. My kids are young enough to straddle the line easily. My wife has shown some interest in the fitness and latin dance games, so there may be some hope there. It's still hard for me to get excited about Kinect for me. But for my family? Yeah, I think it'll be good. Chances are good we'll have one in the home for Christmas.

MAHG - Can Sony Promote without Bashing?

2010-07-08T12:41:00.004-06:00

Sony is insecure. They have a quality product with laudable features, but where they should be spending their promotional time and dollars advertising themselves and why they have a superior offering, they can’t seem to stop attacking and belittling their competition.

Full story…

MAHG - Kinect vs. Move

2010-07-01T09:10:00.003-06:00

Nintendo has been a runaway success with the Wii console. Where motion controls and casual games were at best a niche market when it came to consoles, they proved that consumers would buy the hardware as fast as they could make it. Hoping to capitalize on the idea, both Microsoft and Sony have introduced new devices that promise to “change the way [we'll] play games” on their respective consoles. But how are they doing it, and will it pay off?

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A new gig - Mad As Hell Reviews

2010-06-29T13:41:00.000-06:00

I'm taking on a new assignment, which hopefully will motivate me to write a lot more (or at least more consistently) than I have been up 'til now. I am now the Editorial Commentator for Mad As Hell Reviews, the opinion and editorial section of Mad As Hell Gamers.

MAHG is the creation of JediChric and SparkStalker, the ones who started the podcasting movement at GeezerGamers.com. They decided to branch out and do their own thing, creating their own brand as it were.

Since game reviews are the domain of some of the other contributors there, I'll likely keep my own game reviews (when I have time for them) over here, when I get around to them. But, I may end up throwing a review over there instead, if it happens to fill in a gap they need to have covered.

In any case, look for my first post, coming very soon. I won't spoil it, but I'll give you a hint as to the topic: it may move you, you may connect with it, and it'll change the way you read blog posts this holiday season.

2010-05-25T20:29:00.002-06:00

Released this month was the beta for Halo Reach, Bungie's last game in the Halo franchise; and all people with a copy of Halo ODST were invited to jump in the beta (in a matter very similar to Crackdown and the Halo 3 beta three years ago).

I think it goes without saying that I, of course, jumped in.

It definitely feels like Halo. The look, the sounds, the weapons, they are all very at home in the Halo universe. But there are a lot of differences, too, that make it new and exciting.

Visually, I'd say Reach is "grittier" than the other Halo games. It is set immediately before the events of Halo 1, and it's made to look older and less polished than the games set in a later time. (Whether that "makes sense", considering Reach fell in a very short time before Halo 1's opening, is I'm sure a matter of debate.) Spartan armor is mottled and scuffed instead of smooth and shiny, and even the medals that appear on-screen have a dirty, textured look to them.

The "equipment" feature from Halo 3 has evolved into "armor abilities". Instead of picking up a piece of equipment, you spawn with a certain ability as part of your "loadout" (which is a combination of your armor ability — constant until you die — and your starting weapons — which can be replaced with what you find on the battlefield). You may choose a loadout with Sprint, Armor Lock, Jetpack, or Cloak. (Elites, in the game types where you can play them, have a Roll/Evade ability in place of the Sprint, and they have no Armor Lock.)

The loadout feature is nice, in that it gives you the option to tailor your abilities to your playing style. Also, since you can choose a new loadout every time you spawn, you're not locked into something for the entire game — you can switch abilities between deaths depending on how the enemy is reacting or how the game is playing. (In traditional capture-the-flag games, I was partial to using Cloak to get in or guard the flag, and then switching to Sprint once the flag was in motion.)

Also new are assassinations. When you come up behind someone, you can tap your melee button for an instant kill. That's not new. But if you hold the button down, you will perform an assassination move that lets your opponent know they've been owned, with a knife in the back, or a neck-breaking head twist, or a pound to the ground. That's new. They don't seem like much, but they add a lot to the game, especially when you sprint up behind the enemy flag carrier, jump up behind him, and do a two-fisted pummel to smash him into the ground inches before the score point to save the game. The only danger is, during the assassination animation, you are vulnerable, and someone can kill you to save their teammate. Or, someone can kill your victim and steal your kill (you are awarded with an "assist", for holding them still, I suppose). The beta did seem overly sensitive in turning quick-touch kills into animated assassinations, which resulted in a few vulnerable deaths in close quarter intense firefights; that may have been intentional, to show off and test the assassination code.

One of the interesting problems in making a prequel game is adding new elements to make the game interesting, but without adding things that make the past seem better than the future and leave you wondering, "What happened to R2-D2's thrusters?" I don't know if they've succeeded here or not. It could be argued that these armor abilities were only in development on Reach and were therefore lost when the planet fell. Maybe the campaign will address this, or maybe it'll just sweep it under the rug. While it may not be important to Reach's game play, it will have an effect on the overall Halo universe; and for a company that has dedicated much into the building of this universe's story, it will be important, especially to maintain the immersion. I suppose we'll see how it plays out when the game launches.

In all, I'm excited for the new Halo. It's different enough from Halo 3 to be new, but enough of the same to be worth playing. My preorder is in for the retail release, which, I'm sure by no coincidence, has been announced for exactly 117 days after the end of the beta.

Piracy Causes Everything

2010-05-24T21:08:00.000-06:00

Many software publishers and developers like to blame piracy for everything, from less-than-expected sales to the reason for DRM, but this is a new one. Sony America's Senior VP of Public Relations Rob Dyer gave an interview to Gamasutra recently. In the interview, Gamasutra brought up the lagging sales of the PSP handheld consoles. Dyer's response:

… And we also believe that there's a way that you will be able to, not stop, but slow down the piracy in the first 30 to 60 days from a tech perspective. There's some code that you can embed that we've been helping developers implement in order to get people at least to see a 60-day shelf life before it gets hacked and it shows up on BitTorrent.

That's been the biggest problem, no question about it. It's become a very difficult proposition to be profitable, given the piracy right now. And the fact that the category shrunk inside of retail.

It's true; you can't hit any torrent tracker site without seeing thousands of download links for a Sony PSP.

Wait, no.

Last time I checked, you can't download hardware. And if pirates are actively seeking out games to download and play, it stands to reason they'd need a piece of hardware to play them on. So, rampant piracy of games, if anything, should have an increase of hardware sales, no? Heck, I'd be more inclined to buy a PSP if I knew I could easily hack it and get a bunch of free games for it (if I did that sort of thing).

Piracy may have an impact on the revenue the entire division brings in, when you combine hardware and software; but until we can hook up a replicator to BitTorrent, you'll have a hard time convincing me that the failure to move hardware is a fault of piracy.

A Look at Swearing in Video Games

2010-04-16T00:32:00.000-06:00

Here's a nice little opinion piece written by the author Mohammed over at Frag Crunch, titled "A Look at Swearing in Video Games". I've expressed my dismay on more than one occasion here about a game's use of excessive language ruining the experience (or interest) for me. It's always nice to get a second opinion.

I'm not sure I'd go as far as he did in his conclusion, though, that the excess of a few examples necessarily negates a whole medium's status as art. I would suggest that Hollywood has put out quite a few movies that take things to excess with little value (language, gratuitous sex, violence, meaningless special effects); but just because Michael Bay puts out a few movies that are all explosions and no plot, I wouldn't say movies aren't an art form in the general sense. The value of certain, particular works of art in the medium can be debated, but I'd still say it's a form of expression.

Single player vs. multiplayer

2010-04-07T20:41:00.001-06:00

I've completed the Legendary campaigns of Halo 2, Halo 3, and Halo ODST. I've slogged through the Veteran campaigns of Call of Duty 2 and Call of Duty 4, including rescuing a hostage from an airplane full of terrorists in less than 60 seconds. I've even managed to get through a complete episode of Left 4 Dead 2 on... well, Advanced, not Expert.

And yet, when I attempt to play on Xbox Live, I might as well bring a knife to a gunfight.

I don't know what it is, whether it's incompetent enemy AI or something in me that just chokes when I go against human players. All I know is, this music video sums it up nicely. :)

Game Room

2010-03-31T22:07:00.000-06:00

New to Xbox Live Arcade this spring is Game Room, a virtual arcade space where you can play retro arcade and console titles and issue game challenges to your friends.

The games in Game Room are pretty faithful recreations of the originals. You can even select different viewing options, including the original arcade feel that replicates the pronounced curves of the CRTs used in the old machines. Unfortunately, the same can't quite be said of the controls. Games that control with a joystick seem to work just fine, but games with special controls aren't quite as good. The arcade console Tempest, for instance, had a knob that allowed for very quick and precise control over your paddle. That control over both speed and precision is just something that doesn't work quite well when translated to pushing a stick left and right. The old Intellivision console had a numeric keypad on its controllers, and so each keypad button that a game uses is mapped to one of the buttons on the controller. While they made their best attempt at grouping like functions on the controller (i.e. Sub Hunt had keys for ¼, ½, ¾, and full speed, which are all mapped to the four cardinal directions of the D-pad), you still have to take some time memorizing the translation before you can play the game effectively.

On the plus side, this app has some serious potential for sucking some money away from me. On the first day alone, I was eager to buy Tempest and Yar's Revenge. The challenges are a great idea, letting you call out or answer a call to play a certain game based on certain rules (e.g., who can last the longest in Tempest, or who can get the highest score with the default settings in Centipede). The "medals" you can earn in each game are kind of a neat idea, too, as they give you something to shoot for outside of simply playing the game, but they're straightforward enough that you don't have to go out of your way to get them (no having to set up a "custom room" with a second controller plugged in to boost).

However, there are more than a couple negatives. For one, the user interface doesn't feel like it was tested for usability. There is a "showcase arcade" where most of the arcade cabinets are already set up, but to enter it, you have to press 'X' on the main menu. Why not just make this a menu option? The first time I entered the showcase arcade, it was from accidentally hitting X, and it took me a bit of time to figure out, first, where I was; second, how to get out; and third, how to get back in if I wanted to. And, whether in the showcase arcade or your own, they opted to preserve a "realistic" arcade feel by having actual arcade cabinets and, almost always, an Avatar playing at each one. It's all well and good, except as you're browsing the arcade, it's difficult to see what machine you're looking at. The game's title in its original font and design isn't always legible when seen on a virtual cabinet on your TV screen, and the Avatars' large heads tend to block most of the game cabinet's screen and even some of the name placard.

A rather glaring UI issue that I find completely annoying (and really fuels my doubt as to whether it was tested for usability) is the Atari 2600 console screen. The Atari 2600 had a series of switches on the console that you used to select difficulty and game types, and to start or reset the game. To access these switches, you press a button on your controller, and a pop-up window with those switches appears on the screen. However, this pop-up window almost completely covers the game screen, so as you're pushing, for instance, the Game Select switch, you can't see the screen to see what game you've selected. You have to keep closing the window to peek. It borders on unusable.

Another issue I'm running into a lot is connectivity. Very frequently, I get a warning message about not being connected to the Game Room server. Fortunately, most of the time, it's recoverable. When ending a ranked game, I'm warned that failure to connect to the server could result in a lost score, but I have the option of hitting 'A' to try again, and it almost always connects on that second try. (Or, if it fails, it doesn't tell me.) When I view my challenges, I frequently see "Challenges are not available", and I have to back out and re-enter the challenges list before the message goes away and the challenge list is active.

Whether this is related to connectivity or not, I don't know; but I have had my medals and level reset once so far. I had already earned six medals (three each in Tempest and Yar's Revenge), and I had ranked up to Level 2 (and earned an achievement for the trouble). But one night, I thought I'd check my profile, and I noticed that my number of medals had somehow dropped to 3 (only three medals that I had in Yar's Revenge as of the night before — which, if I had thought about it, I might have realized it seemed odd that the game seemed to be "re-awarding" me the medals as I was playing Yar's, because it probably was) and my level was back down to Level 1. I worked on and re-acquired my medals in Tempest (which was no easy task, since I'm not nearly as skilled in Tempest as I am in Yar's), and sure enough, the game made a big deal about awarding my medals and showing me level up to Level 2. (No extra achievement points for doing it twice though.)

And, I shouldn't forget that, on that first night, Game Room wouldn't even let me buy any games. I'd press my button, but nothing would happen — no points deducted from my account, no new game for my arcade. It did seem to resolve itself by the next night, but of course that meant I wasn't purchasing my games on "release day", which meant I didn't get the free "mascot" with each arcade game I bought.

And that's when I can even start the application. Fairly randomly, Game Room gets stuck in the "Loading" screen, where the progress bar stops at about ¼ and never moves forward, until I force an exit to the dashboard and try again.

The concept behind Game Room is a good one, good enough for me to fight through the issues to get to the actual games, relive some old memories, and reclaim my title as a Yar's Revenge champion. But the issues are numerous, enough to make a lot of people I know forgo the experience altogether, which is really a shame.

EA not learning from Ubisoft's mistakes

2010-03-23T22:21:00.002-06:00

It wasn't that long ago that I was writing about Ubisoft's abysmal DRM scheme, that makes their games unplayable if your internet connection isn't perfect (or if their servers go down). Well, it seems EA isn't learning from that mistake, as Command and Conquer 4 suffers from the same problems, where a hiccup in a network connection in a single-player game causes an expulsion of the game (and associated progress loss).

What is amazing to me is how the EA blogger that broke this news then goes on to justify this, by saying it's not fair to call it a "single-player game" since it's constantly uploading stats and downloading unlocks.

Excuse me? It's not fair to call a game that you play by yourself a "single-player game"? Oh, he thinks we should call it an online-only game, "which it basically is". Yeah, it basically is because of the obnoxious DRM installed with the game.

Oh, but wait. EA has a perfectly logical explanation: It's not DRM. See, it's a service. You can install the game on multiple computers, create multiple "Commander Personas" (save files?), play the same save from any computer, and even run the game without the game disc.

Really? Funny, I can do all of that with, say, Diablo 2 (well, with a "nocd" hack to play without the disc). If I want to play my saved game on another computer, I can copy the save files on a USB stick. No internet connection required.

Yes, EA. If you require me to connect to your server to play the game, that is DRM. You do get points for adding features to the service, but the service is still DRM. You can't just redefine it away.

F- you, Fisher!

2010-03-19T09:41:00.001-06:00

I got a chance to play the demo for the upcoming Splinter Cell: Conviction on Xbox last night. I've enjoyed the Splinter Cell games in the past, even if it takes me an excessively long time to play them (I think I may have a tendency to "over-stealth"). I've missed out on the multiplayer, but the single player experience is one I've found to be fairly well-done.

The demo is certainly interesting. The game play is really intense. The demo starts out with Sam Fisher interrogating someone in a bathroom for information leading to the people responsible for the murder of his daughter. While Fisher has never exactly been hugs and kisses before, this scene is particularly brutal. See, new to interrogations is the use of the environment to encourage the victim to talk. What that means in this case is, if you're standing near a urinal, Sam will take the guy's head and smash it into the fixture, repeatedly, until the porcelain basin is destroyed. The guy will then give up some information, which is projected on the walls of the room. The effect has a very dramatic, cinematic feel, like a scene out of Natural Born Killers. To get more information, Sam can take his victim over to the bathroom's mirrors and smash his head into them, or use his body to break down the stall doors. It's almost unsettling in its brutality.

The demo then flows into the next mission, where you must infiltrate a warehouse. The transition is, again, very movie-like and very well-done. If it's any indication of the final game, then there is going to be very little in the way of "loading times" as each mission is just going to flow right into the next one. Very nice.

The game has a very easy-to-use cover system, where holding the left trigger lets you take cover behind obstacles, and tapping A lets you move from cover to cover. It's a convenient way to not only discover not only where you can take cover, but get to those places without fighting your controller or the environment. The "tagging" system offers a very easy way to take out enemies quickly (tag up to three enemies, then hit a button and Sam takes them out automatically), but to keep from making the game too easy, you have to "earn" the tags by getting in close and taking people out with a punch.

Objectives are projected onto buildings and scenery. It fits the whole cinematic theme and has the added bonus of guiding you to your destination. In the back of my mind, I'm wondering if there's going to be an instance where the projected text is going to be hard to read because of perspective or contrast with the environment, but it definitely didn't come up in the (very short) demo.

The big downer, though, was what happened when I encountered enemies in the warehouse and started taking them out. Every time I was discovered, or took a bad guy out, the survivors who were now on my case would shout obscenities. And not just any obscenities, either; most common were "F-bombs" of some form or another, followed closely behind by taking the Lord's name in vain. They were loud, punctuated, and it happened every time. And I could find no in-game option to censor the language.

Call me a "prude" if you wish, but this is not something I want to hear when I'm playing a game for my own entertainment. (At least, when I'm playing online, if another person takes their language over the top, I have the option of muting that player.) I don't like it; my wife, who is nearly always sitting in the family room reading while I'm playing, doesn't want to hear it; and we don't want our toddler, who lays around the room while I'm playing until he finally falls asleep, to be exposed to it in our house. It's one of the main reasons I stayed away from Gears of War, it's one of the reasons I shunned Rainbow Six: Vegas, and it's why I'm going to avoid Splinter Cell: Conviction this year.

Ubisoft proves piracy pays

2010-03-08T18:38:00.001-07:00

Computer software publishers have a problem. Ideally, they want to get as many people as possible to be able to purchase, use, and enjoy their software. But, because a computer program is a set of digital instructions that can theoretically be copied indefinitely, they want to ensure that the only people who are using said software are those who have paid for a legitimate copy and not just copied the bits.

As time and technology have moved on, companies have tried more and more aggressive methods of protecting their product to try and prevent people from using an unpaid copy of their programs; and those who circumvent those methods, the "pirates", have become more adept at defeating those methods and distributing the fruits of their labors, i.e., free, unprotected versions of the software.

Where I've noticed it a lot lately, since it's my hobby, is in the realm of videogames. EA had been taking a lot of bad press for implementing what were seen at the time as tight restrictions, limiting the number of installations and requiring their games to re-authenticate with an online server every few days before allowing any play. Other companies have had their own DRM schemes that people seem to alternately complain about and accept as the cost of doing business, whether it's the "stealth" install of device drivers like SecuROM that try to authenticate your disc or the requirement of logging in to an online-enabled account.

The current bad boy of DRM, though, is Ubisoft, who has one-upped the DRM policy on their newest game Assassin's Creed 2 by having the game require authentication with their servers not just on installation, nor periodically at launch, but continuously during game play. If the game at any time loses its connection to the server, it immediately kicks the player back to the main menu, causing the player to lose any in-game progress since their last save (a problem exacerbated by the fact that the game apparently doesn't allow you to save at any point, just at designated checkpoints).

Even the most cursory analysis reveals several fatal flaws in this approach. First, requiring an internet connection at all means taking this game traveling (or attempting to use in a home without an "always-on" broadband connection) is pretty much out. Second, home internet services are not 100% stable. I've had my Comcast cable internet connection drop during an online gaming session within the past month — briefly, but long enough to kick me out of the Xbox 360 gaming session I was playing at the time. Third, users on a wireless connection are even more prone to interference that can disrupt their connection. Again, I've had my wireless router hiccup more than once in recent memory. My PC doesn't usually take too long to reconnect before I'm surfing off to the next web page, but if I happen to be streaming a video at the time, then restarting is typical. That's an extremely minor annoyance in web surfing; but if it meant losing progress in a challenging videogame where I've struggled to reach the next checkpoint? That goes way beyond "annoying" and well into "return game for refund" territory.

That alone should cause people to hold a tea party in protest. (Keep in mind that this is a single player game, something one would rather expect to play offline.) But those issues only address the customer's side of the connection.

This weekend, Ubisoft's DRM servers went down, which meant, no matter how stable your own internet connection was, the game was completely unplayable. No one who owned the game was able to actually play it, because the game couldn't contact Ubisoft's incommunicado servers.

Except, of course, if you pirated it. See, the DRM, much like any other DRM in existence, was cracked within days of the game's release. (Most of the time, it's just a question of whether the crack is going to be released after or before the game itself.) And those who pirated the game were playing a version that did not require contact with Ubisoft, and therefore were completely unaffected by this fiasco. (More or less; the crack is still in progress in that a user can launch a game without the server, but there are still issues when the game attempts to check during play. It appears to be more of an issue with Assassin's Creed 2 than with Silent Hunter 5, which has a similar scheme but "phones home" less frequently.)

The problem, which has been noted time and time again and is summed up nicely in this recent Penny Arcade comic, is that companies like EA and Ubisoft attempt to combat piracy by implementing stronger measures to force the software to only work when they want it to. However, these stronger measures not only completely fail to deter pirates (who often have a cracked version of the same software within the same week of the product's retail release), but they also drive potential paying customers away — frustrated by these "piracy protection" measures that effectively prevent them from playing the game they legally purchased, they will either not buy the software, or they will seek out the pirated versions themselves, which offer a superior product by not failing to work when some irrelevant criteria check fails to pass. The companies take this increase in piracy as a call to action to combat it with even stronger DRM measures, pushing more people to piracy to avoid them.

And sadly, it's the law-abiding, paying customers that lose.

Didn't anyone teach Nintendo to share?

2010-02-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

When one of my kids was in the hospital for an extended stay last summer, we bought him a Nintendo DSi, and we helped his older brother get one as well. One thing I noticed as they played each other's games was that game saves were stored on the cartridge, not on the DSi's internal memory. The other thing that I noticed was that games limited the number of saves they would support to a very small number. Whether it was by intentional design or merely as a function of the amount of data saved divided into the amount of flash memory that it is cost-effective to install on a cartridge, the result is the same.

The result is, because, for example, the Pokémon games only support saving a single game, and because the game is saved on the cartridge, my kids are not able to share those game cartridges with each other. They can only share cartridges that happen to have more than one save slot in them.

Now, as it happens, the Pokémon games aren't as big of a deal. Each boy having his own game is a benefit, because being able to play at the same time, and trading pokémon with each other, is a key feature of the game.

However, not all games directly benefit from having two copies. One of my boys recently got a copy of Drawn to Life: The Next Chapter, and it was only after he started playing it that we discovered it only has a single save game slot. This is contrary to the first Drawn to Life game, which, because it has more than one save slot, my kids are able to share back and forth and play their own save.

Probably the most annoying part of this whole situation (aside from the fact that there's really no reason for this considering the game console itself has plenty of storage for save data, and it would even be cheaper to make without requiring flash memory on every cartridge) is that there is no way to know the save slot situation ahead of time. Nowhere on the package does it say how many save slots are on the cartridge, nor could I find a convenient website that lists games with the number of save slots they have.

It's rather annoying that such a critical piece of information for building a library that's intended to be shared between two users is effectively completely hidden. It almost makes me wonder if this situation isn't intentional, to prevent people from sharing games, to try and get people to buy more individual copies.

Splosion Man

2010-02-18T00:04:00.001-07:00

One of my boys has made up a super hero, "Orange Fire Boy". I'm not exactly sure where he comes from or what his powers are, but I know he somewhat resembles the Human Torch from the Fantastic Four. So when I saw the game Splosion Man — whose starring character is also orange and covered in flames — become a "Deal of the Week" for a measly five bucks, I thought he might get a kick out of it, and so I picked it up.

Splosion Man is pretty easy to learn. You play a science experiment run amok, who is trying to escape the laboratory (and take revenge on the scientists who are responsible for his "condition"). Your only weapon is the ability to explode, which you do by pressing any of the four face buttons. (All four buttons are mapped to "SPLODE", but you can get a quick 10-point achievement for remapping any button to... um, well, "SPLODE" is the only option.) By exploding back and forth off of walls, Splosion Man can "climb" upward into new areas. Exploding next to barrels can give him a boost (sometimes slight, sometimes a high-speed launch). Exploding next to equipment causes lots of satisfying debris, and exploding scientists results in a comical fountain of steaks to erupt from their body (which just falls down, intact — hey, they're not trying to be disgusting or M-rated here).

Some of the levels can be a little challenging. Some don't give you time to stop and rest, you just have to keep running. But there's no limit on the number of times you can die and start over. (If you die a certain number of times, the game does give you the option to skip to the next level, although rumor has it there's a price for this.…)

But unfortunately, Splosion Man's strength is also its weakness. The mechanics are so simple, that there really are a limited number of ways you can use it to get through the lab. There are a lot of levels, around 50 in all, and although each one is different from the others, they all repeat a lot of the same elements over and over such that each new level brings very few surprises.

Depending on your target audience, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. My first-grade son loves it. It's something he can easily figure out and is on his way to mastering — which is saying a lot, because, honestly, he isn't nearly as skilled as his older brother. He also loved the gamer picture and the Avatar T-shirt with the orange fire guy logo. (Splosion Man was the first game to feature an "Avatar Award".) It was, as I hoped, right up his alley. And the spastic title character is something all my boys love watching.

For myself, I don't mind it at all. It's a fun little diversion with some quirky humor, and a decent platformer to boot. The levels aren't overly long, which means playing for short stretches is easy without losing progress. (Indeed, short stretches are almost required to avoid becoming bored with the repetition.) Probably my only major complaint (so far; only completed "World 1") is the boss battle. Whereas the levels leading up to it are replete with checkpoints, the boss battle had none. If you died (and there were plenty of "one-shot kills", to add to the frustration), you had to start the whole boss fight over, rather than starting at the last major "event".

I wouldn't say it's the best five bucks I've ever spent, but I've certainly done a lot worse.

You don't buy DLC, you rent it

2010-02-08T21:23:00.001-07:00

It doesn't seem like it was that long ago when I wrote about games disappearing off the Live service. It seemed not to make much of a ripple on the internet, as they were "just" a handful of arcade games that no one seemed to care about. I wondered then what it would take to stir up enough anger that people might actually start to care about digital distribution, how it takes away their rights and privileges, turning "buying" into "leasing" under terms that only the network owner controls and can change at any time "for the good of the service".

On Friday, Xbox Live's Major Nelson dropped a bombshell, announcing on his blog that Microsoft was discontinuing Xbox Live support for all Xbox 1 consoles and games. Officially, it's so they can evolve the Live service without being restricted by features the original games couldn't support. It still seems to me they should've been able to work around this, by versioning the service and system calls. Windows has been doing this for decades, after all, where the same API behaves differently depending on how it's being called. But then, it's been theorized that Windows's instability is partially a result of its attempt to support old software as well as new, so I don't fault them for wanting to shrug off the old to move forward. I still question whether it's entirely necessary. Necessary or not, though, it's the move they're making.

Last month, I wrote about the problem with dedicated servers, and how games that rely on those servers become useless online when (not if) the companies that run them give up support. I mentioned that games that don't do that benefit from the fact that Xbox Live uses peer-to-peer and can continue to be played online indefinitely. Unfortunately, Microsoft just negated that argument. The Xbox Live service was responsible for matching those peers, and now, even without a dedicated server reliance, all games are going to be useless online. Sure, LAN will still work (which means certain LAN-tunneling programs like Xlink Kai or XBConnect can be used to emulate the service), but it's not quite the same.

But wait, there's more — or rather, less! Microsoft, being the forward-thinking company they are, decided to get a head start on the end-of-life process and pulled all the Xbox 1 content from their servers immediately. That means any downloadable content, such as the maps for Halo 2, was no longer available. As you can imagine, this greatly interfered with Bungie's suggestion to play a few rounds of Halo 2 for "old time's sake" before support goes away, as all the matchmaking playlists require all the maps (they're all free at this point, after all). See, users who don't have them available, because they've either deleted them to make room on their hard drives for "current" content, or they've replaced their consoles sometime (the maps are bound to the console when installed and won't play on another console without re-downloading/reinstalling), can't get them. Now, Bungie happens to have enough "pull" with Microsoft that they've talked Microsoft into granting an "exception" and putting Halo 2 maps back online, which is great for them, but not so much for people who might want one last crack at an online romp through, say, Crimson Skies.

Where I hope this makes people very angry, is that the Halo 2 maps were not always free. When they were first released, they were at a price; which means people paid real money for this content. In a couple months, it will no longer be available. (Other games had for-pay content as well, but Halo 2 is the best-known and still the most-played original Xbox game, and the one most likely to stir up a fuss.) So, content that people have paid for, on a game that people still play (either because they haven't upgraded to a 360 — and I do know someone who hasn't — or because they happen to think Halo 2 is a good game, and it happens to be playable on the 360), a game whose name has been practically synonymous with the word "Xbox" since its launch, is going to be taken away.

Is it enough for people to get mad about yet? Will we stop hearing the chant, "The disc is dead! Long live DLC!" Or is it "ok" because Halo 2 is such an old game; that people have "played enough" that they don't "need" that content anymore; that sure, it was a rental, but it was for a "long enough" term that it doesn't matter; and there "aren't enough" people affected to "worry about"? (And did I use enough "scare quotes" to accurately convey my "opinion" on "that"?)

Lego Rock Band

2010-01-30T16:27:00.001-07:00

There's not a whole lot to be said about Lego Rock Band, to be honest. It's pretty much the same old Rock Band game, just with a Lego skin. Rectangles, now in the shape of Lego bricks, slide down the tracks, and you use the same plastic instruments to match the colors.

There are a few new features worthy of note. There is a new "super easy" mode, where a player only needs to strum or hit a drum to "score" (i.e., it doesn't matter if you hit the right color, so long as you hit something). It's very helpful for kids, spouses, parents, etc. who want to play along but just can't get it. There's also an "auto kick-pedal" option just for the drums, which could work for someone like me who just can't get two hands and a foot to coordinate.

Also, in the "story" mode, you have the chance to play challenges, where you use "the power of rock" to accomplish some task (demolish a building, summon rain for a farmer's crops, beat back a giant octopus). It's a little entertaining, in that it adds a bit of purpose to the game — except it is really only good for spectators. You still have to concentrate on the note tracks, which makes it difficult to appreciate the visuals going on in the background. (Seeing the roadies pop up to shout "Ghostbusters!" in the chorus is cute, but I've only been able to see it out of the corner of my eye.) Supposedly, if you're playing multiplayer, the challenges work by feeding notes to one player at a time, though; unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to experience this first-hand yet.

The game also lets you play "short versions" of songs (at least, the ones on disc), which is helpful when you're playing the same songs over and over again. (Yes, the song list, while including a lot of good songs, is fairly short.)

Lego Rock Band is mostly cross-compatible with the Rock Band catalog, which helps to make it less repetitive. Harmonix does apply a certain rating to the songs, though, and only songs that are rated "age-appropriate" are allowable in Lego Rock Band. I don't begrudge them trying to implement this restriction in their "cute" edition, but as my wife and I went through the Rock Band store and noted which songs were marked available for Lego Rock Band and which weren't, we found some rather surprising choices.

My older son used to be more into the Rock Band series (although his interest had waned in recent months), and my second son loves the Lego games. Also, of the songs on my MP3 player, both of them had really taken to the Ghostbusters theme song, begging for me to convert it for playback on their DSi's and listening to it repeatedly. I had thought Lego Rock Band would be the perfect storm then, mixing Lego and Rock Band, and including Ghostbusters in its track list. Plus, new features like the "super easy" mode would make it possible for my less coordinated younger son to play without getting frustrated.

Unfortunately, they just haven't been interested. Whether they've just tired of the plastic guitar genre, or they're just too interested in the DSi games they got for Christmas, I'm not sure. Even when they do put their Nintendos down and play the 360, though, Lego Rock Band just hasn't been their game of choice.

I don't regret the purchase, even if I am a little disappointed by the lack of enthusiasm I got from my kids.

Tower Bloxx Deluxe

2010-01-27T21:27:00.001-07:00

My son bought this Xbox Live Arcade game with some points that Santa brought him for Christmas. Gameplay is ridiculously simple — you build residential towers by dropping blocks from a crane. Your only control is the 'A' button to drop a block (although you do need the stick and other buttons for selecting where in the city you are building your tower). The crane swings the block from side to side, and depending on how accurately you stack your blocks, your tower will sway as well. The more perfectly you stack your blocks, and the higher you build your towers, the more people will move into them. Higher populations unlock taller possible towers and special bonus blocks.

Beyond the very simple core gameplay, there's a bit of thinking and strategy in planning out your cities, as there are rules for where each tower can be placed. Your entry-level blue towers can go anywhere, but the next-sized-up red tower can only go next to an existing blue tower, the next-sized green tower can only go in an empty space touching both a red and a blue tower, and so on.

Still, there's not much to the game. Doesn't really seem worth the $10 in Points. Plus, it's more than a little frustrating, in that "completing" the game really requires dropping blocks with pinpoint accuracy, and it won't count if you're off by just a couple pixels (which is incredibly difficult to even see on a CRT display).

I probably would've discouraged my son from getting it, since there are better games for the money, but it was, after all, his money.

Where were you when the servers went dark?

2010-01-09T21:50:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Sega pulled the plug on the multiplayer servers for Chromehounds. While it's not a game I played often (personally, I logged maybe a total of 80 hours over the 3+ years I owned the game), and I had a lot of complaints about it, it's still overall a good game, if only for the experience I had playing it with fellow Geezer Gamers, and it will certainly be missed.

Chromehounds had a lot of really bad achievements — from the leaderboard-style ones; to the rare, random event one; to the ones that can only be achieved through impossibly long hours of grinding (even above and beyond what this achievement enthusiast is willing to endure). Of course, a lot of them can be forgiven, since they were created when achievements were still relatively new. The majority of these achievements, however, are now completely unavailable. Because they were dependent on the online war simulation, which was hosted on the dedicated server, there's now no option for getting those achievements.

But no game is all about achievements. Chromehounds was about building and customizing giant military robots, joining with a group of friends, and fighting a group of enemy robots. Our preference was for fighting computer-controlled opponents. Although they were fairly predictable and had accuracy and range beyond realistic, it was better than running into humans who played the game to such an extent that they would build ridiculous Hounds with obnoxious combinations designed to destroy an enemy in a single shot.

Of course, the computer-controlled players were controlled by the central server, as was the state of the war and all its battlefields, so those types of matches are gone forever.

Other server-managed features also went offline, such as squads. Initially, this was just sad from a sentimental view, but we realized that it also put an end to one of the highlights of the game: being able to trade Hound builds and parts with each other. Since you can only trade with people in your squad (and only when both of you were online simultaneously — this was also before sending things via an Xbox Live message was the norm), trading was also gone.

Probably the most irritating thing of all, though, is the non-war-related game modes. There was a group of four of us who were playing on that last, fateful night. When the server was shut down and the computer opponents were no longer available, we found that "Free Play" was still available. Launching a Free Play mission, we were able to play against each other.

This seemed like a good thing at first. It wasn't much, but it meant there was at least some way we could get online and get in Hounds with each other again. But we quickly discovered, as one of our party ended up kicked out to the game's title screen, that there would be no coming back. When you select "Xbox Live" from the game's title screen, the first thing it does is attempt to contact the central server. When it fails to connect to the server, it doesn't let the game proceed into multiplayer mode. Those of us who were already in that mode could stay there, but once we left, there was no coming back, even to play the game types that didn't require the server.

It's not terribly surprising that Sega took the server offline. Chromehounds is over three years old, which is a long time to be playing a videogame these days. But it does show the weakness in having a game rely on a dedicated server; and how when that server goes, so much of the game goes with it.

Sega is hardly the first or the most egregious offender of this, though. Electronic Arts uses dedicated servers for a lot of its games, most notably its sports titles, and they have announced the impending doom for dozens of their games, including relatively new titles like Madden 09. While this seems more conspicuously like a money grab by forcing customers to "upgrade" to the latest version of their titles, it shows how quickly a game can become "worthless" (at least online) when a company decides it's time to let go, if the game is dependent on a dedicated server.

On the other hand, there are games which probably owe their continued existence to the fact that peer-to-peer is more the rule rather than the exception. If Shadowrun relied on a dedicated server, it's not inconceivable to think the game (which only had an online component and had no single-player mode to speak of) would've lasted a year, considering the parent company, FASA, closed up shop very soon after the game's release. Halo Wars may have been in a similar situation, since developer Ensemble actually closed before the game was on store shelves.

Still, there are advantages to having dedicated servers, like deploying server-side updates and better connections (in the cases when certain peers don't have a good data path between them). Developer Valve walks the line best, by offering the option for using a dedicated server or a peer for a server in Left 4 Dead 2. (Left 4 Dead automatically makes the choice.) If the dedicated servers ever go offline (or, as I've already seen, the choice is made for a dedicated server, but the dedicated servers are already overloaded and none are available for a new game), the game is still fully functional in peer-to-peer mode.

I remember Microsoft taking a lot of heat for their lack of dedicated gaming servers (especially on a paid service), but I think these examples show what happens when games' online components are reliant on a company's continuing support. Games that are peer-to-peer (or at least can fall back to that as an option) can always be played online with a willing partner or opponent, regardless or in spite of the lack of company support or existence. It does also factor into my purchasing decisions. I am very leery of buying EA games (or other games that I know use a dedicated server) for online play, knowing how quickly they might yank support.

A face for radio

2009-12-12T00:32:00.000-07:00

At GeezerGamers.com, we have a community podcast, where the hosts do a get-to-know-you interview with a member of the website, talk about current games, and then discuss some gaming-related topic of the week. Basically, it's just a bunch of old guys shooting the breeze about video games.

Since the hosts live on the east coast of the U.S., most of their guests have also been from the Eastern or Central Time zones, as those are the people they've happened to game with most often (although I've actually been a guest once myself). In order to remedy this and give the west coast members some representation (and to take some of the pressure off of the east coast hosts from having to do a show every week), there will now be two shows, an east and a west coast show, on alternating weeks.

What makes this exciting is, I will be one of the co-hosts! Fellow Geezers SquidgeyFlint and FireMedic41 will be the other hosts, as we do the West Side edition of the Geezer Gamers Community Cast.

Our first episode, where FireMedic41 acts as our "guest" and subjects himself to the "20 questions" segment, is up on the GGCC Blogger site.

Left 4 Dead 2

2009-11-27T14:07:00.000-07:00

Valve took a lot of heat for announcing the release of Left 4 Dead 2 a mere year after its predecessor, which seems odd considering Madden games get a lot less and Call of Duty games get nearly zero criticism for doing the exact same thing year after year. Many seem to feel that Left 4 Dead was not given a promised amount of support or DLC, or that the content of Left 4 Dead 2 should have only been released as DLC for the original.

Left 4 Dead 2 in a lot of ways is the same game as Left 4 Dead, however it does bring a ton of new content that I think "merely" distributing it as a downloadable add-on would not have been feasible. (Honestly, if it were possible, they probably would've made a lot more money partitioning it out as DLC; so the argument that they were trying to milk customers by packaging it as a separate full-price game doesn't hold water.)

Left 4 Dead 2 brings four new survivors into the zombie apocalypse. The setting is in the southeastern United States, and the survivors have a distinct Southern flavor to them. The levels are a lot wider, meaning the survivors aren't guided down a narrow channel through the level; and the levels occur in broad daylight as well as the middle of the night. There are a lot more weapons, rather than just three different weapons in two different powers. There are also new assists (adrenaline shots and defibrillator units), and all-new melee weapons. There are also new special infected — the charger, spitter, and jockey — and new "uncommon" common infected, like CDA agents in hazmat suits and police officers in body armor.

The Director, the program that controls the overall experience, has some new tools in its arsenal, as well. It has more options for distributing medpacks and weapons (no longer placing the same groups of the same weapons in the same locations), the ability to block off some pathways and open up others to change the overall layout of the level, and even the ability to control the weather in some situations.

Ultimately, though, the gameplay is pretty much the same as before. You have to get through the level from one safe room to the next, trying not to get killed along the way. A couple of the new campaigns end in the same type of "hold out for rescue" event as before, but some have very new objectives. One, you have to collect gas cans and fuel up a car to make an escape (while hordes of zombies try to prevent you from doing it), and another you have to keep moving and run across a long bridge. There is even a new style of "crescendo" event — not only do you have mid-campaign moments like Left 4 Dead where you have to stand your ground against an extended horde for a predetermined period of time (e.g., while a noisy elevator slides into position to grant you passage), but Left 4 Dead 2 has new moments where you start the event at one point and have to battle your way through the zombies to the "off switch" to stop the event, and the horde will only keep coming until you do.

Although each of the five campaigns in Left 4 Dead 2 are considered a "game" and can be played in any order, the dialog at the beginning and end of each tells a more coherent story played in sequence, showing the survivors' journey from Savannah to New Orleans and their ultimate rescue by the armed forces. The game therefore does give just a little more of a story than Left 4 Dead — although there is still no real depth or detail given to the backstory. You still don't know a lot about the characters themselves (unless you read the little bio given in the manual), and nothing more about the infection itself.

Compared to Left 4 Dead, the characters in Left 4 Dead 2 don't show a lot of personality. (The notable exception is that Ellis, if you linger in the safe room for a moment at the start of each chapter, will launch into a very long story about the misadventures of his friend Keith, before getting cut off by one of the other survivors.) While the survivors in Left 4 Dead were constantly throwing out one-liners and brief little interchanges throughout their adventure (from Francis's constant murmurings of things he hates, to the always-entertaining elevator dialog in No Mercy, to Zoey, upon seeing the graffiti "GOD IS DEAD", whispering an awed, "Oh, no, the zombies ate God!"), the Left 4 Dead 2 foursome seem to be all business. They swear a lot more, too, which I don't terribly appreciate.

One thing I noticed about the level design is, because the Left 4 Dead 2 levels are so much more "open", it is much easier to feel lost. When playing the original Left 4 Dead, the level design was so constricted and the use of lighting was so dramatic, that it was quite nearly like riding on rails. There was almost no question where to go next. By contrast, I've found that Left 4 Dead 2 does not have the same "guided" feeling to the design, such that I'm not always sure where to go next. Part of that, I think, is because a lot of the levels are daylight, where "follow the light" just isn't possible — but even in the nighttime of the Hard Rain campaign, the lighting cues just aren't as obvious. In fact, I got thoroughly lost wandering through the sugar mill of Hard Rain, and if I didn't happen to be in a party chat with someone who happened to remember enough of that level to give me some general direction, I'm not sure how long I would've wandered around that level. One of the tricks the game uses to help you find out where to go is, when your character is about to go through the right door or up the correct ramp, he'll signal to his fellow survivors with a helpful "Let's go this way" — but that only seems to occur if you're already heading the right way to begin with. If you can't see or find the right door, you don't get a lot of help. Certainly, this is a problem that will fade with experience, but it does ramp up the learning curve in trying to get through the campaigns.

There are five new campaigns, which are all playable in co-op and versus modes. The Survival mode, that was added as free DLC to Left 4 Dead, is included in Left 4 Dead 2. There is also a brand new "Scavenge" mode, where survivors try to keep a generator fueled as long as they can while the infected try to prevent it. The variety of game types do give you more of an option of how much time you need to commit. A campaign can last up to an hour on the easiest level; versus can be a very lengthy proposition, depending on the skill of both teams. On the other hand, Survival and Scavenge offer a co-op and versus game type, respectively, that generally lasts a relatively short time, like 15 minutes or so.

All told, it definitely feels like much more of a complete package than the original, which by comparison seems like a Left 4 Dead Lite. Although it seems more difficult getting a team together (since its release has been eclipsed by this fall's mega-blockbuster Modern Warfare 2 — or is it because people aren't as excited about this release as the last one?), the teamwork and camaraderie in banding together mowing down hordes of zombies to get to the next rescue point is just as fun as the last time.

Download now, play next week!

2009-11-11T20:36:00.000-07:00

Interesting DRM-related goings on in the PC world. The distribution network Steam is offering the ability to not only pre-order games, but pre-download them as well. Since downloading a full game is not an instantaneous process (and is expected to be even worse on a big game's release date), you can download the code early, but be locked out of play until you are able to activate your copy with their server, on the game's actual release date.

Sounds perfectly reasonable, as far as it goes. They have enabled that for the upcoming Left 4 Dead 2, and they also had it available for the much-anticipated Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, whose official release date was Tuesday of this week.

Although the official retail release date was Tuesday, some retailers started selling copies early (which was quickly and "unofficially" copied by GameStop in those areas). So, if you elected to buy a physical game disc instead of the "convenience" of a digital download, there's a chance you could've been playing it early.

Wait, it gets better. When the official retail release date rolled around and people lined up outside retail stores to buy their shiny discs, those who bought the "convenient" digital copy found that it did not activate when midnight changed Monday into Tuesday. In fact, the digital copy would not unlock until Thursday, a full two days later. There was some more confusion as the unlock date was pushed even further out until Friday, but it seems to have been pulled back now to Wednesday night.

Meanwhile, people who bought their shiny discs will have had their fully functional copies for over a day and a half (assuming no issues with DRM).

Wow. So, apparently, in the digital download future, we can not only buy games that we don't own, can't resell, rent, or trade, may not be able to back up and will lose at some uncertain point in the future, but now you can download games and not even get to play them!

I'm sorry, how exactly is this a good thing? Oh right, the publishers directly get your money, whether you get to play the game or not; so it's good for them.

Forza Motorsport 2

2009-11-10T23:05:00.000-07:00

Riffling through some papers, CyberKnight finds an old, incomplete post started back in January. He blows the dust off the pages and decides to finish it.…

A friend of mine recently picked up Forza Motorsport 2, which has just been released as a Platinum Hit collection that includes all DLC for the budget price of $20 (and, interestingly enough, the DLC alone, still on Marketplace and still at its original price, totaling 2000 points, or $25, exceeds the retail cost of the game — but you don't need to hear me go through that again, right?); and in an effort to entice me to join him, he designed the car I've dubbed the "CyberKnight Industries Two-Thousand" that he wanted to "gift" to me. So I decided to pick it up.

I've played the Project Gotham series, and although I have an ok time with it, it's not something I spend hours of time with. I'm not exactly a car enthusiast, so really, racing one car isn't much different than racing any other to me. So, I have to say, in all honesty, Forza doesn't "excite" me. It's an enjoyable game, to be sure; just not something that I feel like I can fully appreciate as much as someone who could tell you the difference between a 2007 Porsche and a 2005 Ferrari, and what would happen if you put a Mitsubishi engine in each.

Which leads me to my next point. Project Gotham delivers a very "canned" experience — the cars in the game are the cars you get to race, as-is. However, in Forza, you can customize your car down to ridiculous details. Different engines are available, different drive shafts, injector systems, exhaust pipes, spoilers, suspension systems, tires, rims, parts I never even knew existed. For a race, you can adjust the downforce applied by the spoilers, adjust tire inflation pressures, gear transfer ratios, and so on. You can even paint your car, and although you're given a very basic set of tools and shapes, a competent painter with a lot of time on his hands can make very intricate patterns, designs, and pictures. What's more, cars can be traded, with all their upgrades and tunings and paint designs, in an online auction house.

In a race, too, you can get telemetry data on your car. Overlayed on the screen, you can see different data, such as the real-time friction vectors applied to each tire, the G-force sustained by the car, and other data.

On the leaderboards, you can download replays from other drivers, and during playback you can view the same telemetry data, and (if the driver allowed it) see what precise tuning data they used to drive their car.

The amount of customizability and information available is enough to impress a complete racing n00b such as myself.

Of course, there is still one annoyance that I can't seem to escape when it comes to racing games. If you're running against equivalent AI, you cannot make a single mistake. The next closest car will always be within a second behind you, and the first error you make in a turn (which, invariably, means you will spin out and end up facing backwards) will result in your opponent passing you, and you will never see him again. Forza 2 does have the option to turn down the AI's difficulty, which greatly reduces this frustration, thank goodness. (Even better, by the time I'm writing this, Forza Motorsport 3 has been released, and it includes a new feature — rewind — so when you make that mistake, you can actually "undo" it and not have one error completely destroy 20 laps of perfection.)

The UI is just a little clunky. It seems to take one too many button presses to have to get around to change cars or slip into the auction house to view your auction statuses. Going into a career race, if your current car isn't appropriate for the race but you have cars that are, the game is very helpful in showing you just the narrowed-down list of cars to pick from; however, that only seems to happen if your current car doesn't work. If your current car is fine, but you want to select a better one, you have to go all the way back out of career to your garage to see your full list of cars and find one yourself.

Niggling UI issues aside, I'd have to say the game sure impresses me. Not sure if that says a lot, considering I'm not a huge car or race fan, but there you go.

Wait... That's not really progress...

2009-11-04T22:51:00.008-07:00

If you buy a piece of content, such as an Arcade game, off of the Xbox Live Marketplace, it is tied to two pieces of information: the gamertag that made the purchase, and the console on which that purchase was initially downloaded. Those two bits of information are encoded in a "license". That license is generated and stored on Microsoft's servers, and a copy is stored with the content (possibly encoded within the file itself, maybe in a separate file; its exact location isn't important).

When you go to access this piece of content (i.e. play the game, or select the downloaded map from the in-game menu, or watch the video, or whatever the "content" is), the console reads the license and checks to see if either of two conditions are true:

1) Is the gamertag in the license currently signed in and connected to Xbox Live?
2) Is this console the same console as the one in the license?

(note that a valid, active connection to Xbox Live is required to validate condition 1)

If you have, or have ever had, more than one console (either you own more than one, or you've replaced it via a store warranty instead of a Microsoft repair), you may have purchased content on multiple consoles, and so you have licenses that have different consoles stored in them. If you are the only game player in your household, this might not be a problem, as no matter where you are, you will always validate against condition 1 and be able to play your content (as long as your internet connection is active and Xbox Live isn't down).

However, if your internet connection goes down, or you have other family members in your household, you may find that some of your legally purchased content doesn't work right — either it's unavailable, or it only lets you play in "trial" mode. This is because condition 1 can't pass (either you aren't logged in when your family/housemates are, or you are unable to log in), nor can condition 2 (it was initially downloaded to some other console).

To mitigate this, Microsoft created the "License Transfer Tool", which lets you transfer all your licenses' console registrations to the same console. Using the tool, you can move everything to your new/current console, updating the console ID stored in the licenses on Microsoft's servers. To update the copy of the license on your actual console, you have to re-download each piece of content individually — however, when you select to re-download a piece of content you already have, your console just updates its copy of the license, which is a very quick download. It's still tedious if you have a lot of content to re-download, since you have to do it one at a time, but at least each download itself is typically less than 15 seconds.

Finding all your content used to be a royal pain in the neck. You could go into your Xbox dashboard and page through your download history, but, since everything (every preview video, every game demo, every seemingly inconsequential bit) is stored there, it was tedious to page through and find it all and download it all one-by-one from the console.

Now, the last page of the transfer tool on the web has a link to your download history, and you can add items to your queue straight from there. Each piece of content is labeled with what it is (demo, video, arcade game, add-on pack), making it much easier to tell at a glance whether it's something that needs to be queued, and an "add to queue" button is right there on the list. The queue is still limited (to a couple dozen items), but if your Xbox is on and signed in while you do this, it will be downloading the licenses faster than you can fill the queue.

Note that Microsoft insists this is not for everyday use, for moving content back and forth between consoles at-will. To enforce this, they only allow the tool to be used once every 12 months.

I had been resisting doing all of this for a while, but my kids were bumping up against some arcade games that were showing up as trials again recently, and I decided to bite the bullet and do it (again; I had done it once before, the harder way, well over a year ago), and I marveled at the improvements in the process. Now they can play all the games I've downloaded.

Sounds nice and easy, right?

Well, it occurs to me that, with every Xbox I've gone through (I think I'm on #5 now), and with some licenses that have transferred and some that haven't, whether I've used this tool or not, the vast majority of my games have not had any issues whatsoever going from Xbox to Xbox.

Why? Because they're on disc.

While they did make the license transfer tool much easier, it's still many, many, many times harder than it should be. Why can't you move your Xbox Live Arcade game to another console and let another gamertag play it? For that matter, why can't you take a game to a console that's not connected to the internet? There's nothing stopping you from doing that with a disc.

Maybe they did make a bad situation better, but it's still a very bad situation.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

2009-10-31T22:44:00.000-06:00

Hey look, another review that was waiting for me to finish. Since I finally finished the game, I suppose I'll finish the review now.

I'd wager just about everyone knows the story of Star Wars, at least as told in the movies. Episodes I - III tell of a young boy, literally born from the force of good, who is born in poverty and struggles to fight for what's right and good as he grows up; and of a man of evil, who transforms a republic into an empire with himself as the head, brings about war and dominance, and corrupts and twists the young man to become his servant. Episodes IV - VI focus on that formerly good young man's son, who dedicates his life fighting the evil of the emperor and his father, in the end redeeming his father from evil.

There's a time between Episodes III and IV that we don't know a lot about. The way the movies are set, we don't need to know much about them, as we see at the end of Episode III the seeds of the story that will be picked up right where it left off in Episode IV 28 years earlier. (That's right, kids — Episode IV came out first. Oh, and let's just be clear: Greedo never fired a shot.) But it's probably safe to assume Vader didn't sit on his hands for 17 years waiting for his kids to grow up and kill his boss.

The Force Unleashed inserts a story into this time frame. Darth Vader, while on his Jedi genocide mission for his emperor, finds that one of his victims has a son who is strong in the Force. After killing the Jedi, Vader takes the little boy and raises him to be his own apprentice, secretly. His goal is to use this apprentice to overthrow the emperor (it's a Sith thing, it's what they do), and to prepare him for this task, he trains him to be a powerful combatant. Which means, basically, you get to kick butt with the Force.

One of the main selling points in The Force Unleashed is its blending of technologies to create a realistic environment. The Digital Molecular Matter engine is in play so that wood splinters, glass shatters, and metal warps; and the Euphoria engine is working so when you pick up an Imperial trooper and fling him through the air, he will panic and attempt to grab on to anything he can to stop from flying around. The result is a fairly realistic feel to the environment. You know, considering it's in a galaxy far, far away and you're causing Imperial troops to fly through glass and wood with the controlling power of the universe.

The premise of the gameplay is solid. I mean, who wouldn't want to be an awesome, Force-wielding mercenary? Sure, you've seen Yoda use the Force to pick an X-Wing up out of a swamp, but this trailer shows the potential scale LucasArts was going for, where the apprentice is seen pulling an Imperial Star Destroyer out of the sky.

The problem is, they seemed to spend the rest of the game making sure you couldn't just waltz through and kick butt with the Force. Enemies have shields that resist the Force, others have weapons that effectively ignore Force shields and lightsaber blocks, and what should be the most common of enemies wield sticks and staffs that hold their own against a lightsaber. In other words, they nerfed the Force.

Additionally, your character is extra-nerfed, as well. Every hit will knock him off-balance or down enough to leave him vulnerable to a number of other attacks while he sobers up — on the harder difficulty settings, this often means one or two hits (and the combo of follow-up attacks received before you can even block, let alone fight back) are enough to do you in. Enemies will, of course, have little difficulty breaking out of any multi-hit combo you try to inflict on them in return, with their Force-resistant sticks and armor.

Not to mention this poor, tormented soul whines like a farm boy pining for a set of power converters — but I'm starting to accept that as standard fare for a Star Wars story.

The boss fights are an exercise in frustration and patience. Usually, there's a certain move or trick that tends to work better than anything else, but usually it's just a matter of evading or racing one unblockable attack after another until you eventually wear the boss down to a quick-time event to finish him off. Those finishing events do add a nice touch of cinematic flair, plus a little bit of cool-down after an intense fight, but they do leave me wondering, "Why couldn't I have pulled all those kick-butt moves on him during the last 10 minutes of combat?"

The story itself isn't bad. It actually does a pretty decent job of fitting right in with the movies, including what I consider the "default" ending. (You have two choices at the end, resulting in a "light side" and "dark side" ending, and the way the camera is positioned at the time you make the choice, it pretty much has you aimed straight down one path and almost completely hides the other.) For as cheesy as it is in some respects, it's not at all out of character for Star Wars — love it or leave it.

The game play, though, leaves a lot to be desired. It's fairly frustrating, even when you're playing at the easy levels (you don't die so much, but you still spend an unreasonable amount of time getting knocked down and waiting to stand back up). It's hard to shake the feeling that you're fighting with both midichlorians tied behind your back.

Still, I slogged through it, because there were achievements to be had. And it's not like I'm any stranger to frustration.

I did pick up the Jedi Temple mission pack when it went on "sale" as a "Deal of the Week". It was extremely short. I played through the mission in a half hour on the hardest difficulty, and because (maddeningly) the difficulty completion achievements don't stack, I played through three more times on each of the lesser difficulties. By the end of two hours, I had played through it four times and completed all achievements. I haven't had any interest in the $10 Tatooine mission DLC.

Defense Grid: The Awakening

2009-10-20T17:58:00.001-06:00

My first introduction to tower defense as a genre was when the game Crystal Defenders came to Xbox Live. In "tower defense", enemy units attempt to travel from point A to point B, and you must stop them by placing defense units, commonly "towers", along their path. It is very strategic, in that you must decide where and what kind of towers you place to maximize the damage done to the enemy.

I was intrigued by the concept, although that particular game didn't excite me enough to sell me on the game. But when Defense Grid came about, that changed.

In Defense Grid, you have a power plant with two dozen "cores", and enemies come into the field and try to grab a core and escape. In some scenes, the enemies follow a fixed path, and you place your towers along the edges of the path. In others, there are multiple paths connecting large, open spaces, and you place your towers in those spaces to shape the enemies' path.

You have a small arsenal of towers to choose from. There are towers that can only attack at a limited range, towers that can lob volleys at long range (but are useless at short), a tower that can counteract stealth and increase resource retrieval, and one that can emit a pulse and slow down the travel speed of all nearby enemies. Once purchased, a tower can be upgraded up to two times, increasing stats like attack speed, range, and power.

Towers cost resources to produce, which are earned both by destroying enemies and as "interest" on existing unspent resources (so the longer you wait to build towers, the more resources you could have).

The game is extremely simple to play. You can easily finish every level in the campaign with very little effort. However, to get the silver and then the gold medal scores on each level, it takes quite a bit of strategy. It is, to coin a phrase, easy to play, but a challenge to master.

Something I didn't find out until after I had already purchased it, is that the Xbox Live version is actually a port of an existing game for the PC. However, the Xbox Live version includes a few more levels. And, oddly enough, it is priced at only 800 points, or $10 — whereas the retail price of the original PC version was actually around $15. So, wonder of wonders, the Xbox Marketplace's normal price was actually quite a deal compared to the PC version of the game.

I found the gameplay offered at the price to be well worth it. It's certainly been a challenge to complete, just from an achievement perspective; trying to maximize scores and gold-medal all the maps and play variants keep it personally interesting.

Halo 3: ODST

2009-10-06T14:04:00.007-06:00

Bungie's latest release in the Halo franchise was first announced as an "expansion" or a "mini-game", one that wouldn't be a full-priced release. As a consequence, many reviews and comments have judged the release of Halo 3: ODST based on its value as a $60 game. It's probably a fair enough judgment for any game, but ODST probably wouldn't see its value picked apart in just about every review and forum if they hadn't announced that it wouldn't cost $60.

They also billed this game as an "expansion", which seems a little unfair to the game itself (and doesn't help the judgment of its price point as a stand-alone game). The inclusion of the multiplayer component of Halo 3 in the box (with three new maps, not yet released on the Xbox Marketplace), plus the fact that it is called Halo 3: ODST and not just Halo ODST, just seem to add to ODST's identity crisis. Is it a game of its own, or just an extension of Halo 3?

The game takes place in the city of New Mombasa, Africa, which is under attack by Covenant forces, the attack that kicked off Halo 2. (The time frame overlaps probably as much as Halo 2 as it does Halo 3 — making me wonder even more about the "3" in this game's title.) You start out as the rookie of a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers — on the butt-kicking scale, they rank way above a normal Army or Navy soldier, but below a Spartan. The squad is preparing to drop into a lone Covenant ship hovering over the city, when an ONI agent joins the team and changes their orders to drop into the city itself on an unrevealed mission.

This game is quite different than the Master Chief story that comprises Halo 1, 2, and 3. Master Chief is all about eliminating the enemy, plowing through Covenant invaders like a combine through wheat. However, Master Chief has the benefit of being a genetically-enhanced soldier with a metric tonne of powered armor.

An ODST, by contrast, is neither biologically modified nor encased in armor. He is much more — for lack of a better word — "human". Granted, he's no slouch. He's the best of the best, as far as human marines go, at the peak of physical conditioning and trained in a wide variety of human and alien weaponry and technology. He can even run at a normal speed while carrying a machine gun turret. However, without the protective armor, an ODST is much more vulnerable to damage. He doesn't have regenerative health, or a motion tracker, or shields, or the ability to dual-wield. In many ways, it's a lot like Halo 1.

There is a simulated sort of "shield-and-health" system like Halo 1. In ODST, the "shield" is "stamina", and it's not measured with an electronic bar but by a reddening of your vision. When your stamina is depleted, damage is taken to your health (which does have a measurable bar). Staying out of the line of fire will recharge your stamina (and clear your eyesight). It's much less resilient than an actual "shield", but it serves the same basic purpose.

Back to the story. As your squad drops into New Mombasa, the Covenant ship jumps into slipspace. (This is the point, in Halo 2, where Master Chief, Miranda Keyes, and Sergeant Johnson follow in the In Amber Clad and wind up on Delta Halo.) The resulting shockwave from the slipspace jump creates an EMP that knocks out the electrical systems in the ODSTs' drop pods, and they crash in various places around the city. You, playing as the unnamed and unvoiced "Rookie", wake six hours later in nighttime downtown New Mombasa, alone.

The gameplay is split here. The nighttime New Mombasa city streets, as the Rookie, have you attempting to find your squadmates. Although the game purports to offer stealth here, even playing on easy, I found that I was unable to avoid encounters with Covenant forces. The battles tend to be much smaller-scale, with patrols of just a few grunts and a brute typical. You're guided to the story elements in turn by a checkpoint system controlled by the city's Superintendent computer (or, presumably, if you wander around on your own, you could discover them in any order). These nighttime interludes can last as little as 10 minutes if you focus on the next checkpoint and go straight there.

Once you find a relic (a damaged helmet, a discarded sniper rifle, an empty can of biofoam), the game shifts into a "flashback" mode, where you switch to the point-of-view of one of the ODSTs that was there, and the events that led up to leaving that item where you found it. These modes are closer to "typical" Halo: more action-oriented, faster-paced, fighting with squads of AI-controlled marines against larger and more diverse squads of Covenant forces. It is through these "flashbacks" that the story comes together.

On the way, you can find audio clips that tell a side-story of a certain girl whose father worked on the Superintendent program, and what happened to her when the Covenant appeared over New Mombasa. It's completely optional (aside from achievements), but it is a good-quality story with about 40 minutes of audio that is highly reminiscent of the "I Love Bees" audio program that preceded Halo 2.

Eventually, the squad is reunited, and, without spoiling the story, the game ends with the squad making a stand against several waves of Covenant forces as they wait for evac. It gives a fitting climax to the battle, while appropriately setting up the Firefight mode.

Firefight is the Halo version of what Gears of War has popularized as "Horde Mode", where you and up to three friends battle cooperatively against wave after wave of incoming enemy forces. Having not played Gears, I can't offer any first-hand comparisons, but I have heard that ODST generally moves a lot faster in that even the early waves give you a significant number of enemies. It increases the challenge by not only adding more and stronger enemies, but by cycling through different combinations of skulls. These are the same skulls that are available in the ODST and Halo 3 campaigns (the ones in Halo 3 had to be found to be "unlocked" for use; in ODST, they're available from the start) that alter gameplay by making the enemies more damage-resistant, making weapons drop with less ammo, and so on.

In some ways, Firefight is a good mode for picking up and playing with friends. It's set up like the campaign, where you pick your squad from your friends (no matchmaking) and you fight against the AI, but it doesn't lock you into a scripted story and make you and your friends choose a subset of an involved story arc to play through.

On the other hand, Firefight's strength is also its weakness in that it reveals just how simple the gameplay is in Halo; and both how much the story is a powerful part of the game, and how shallow the game feels without it. With wave after wave of the same enemies on the same level, a Firefight match can get almost tiring after a typical hour and a half that a good squad can pull off (on the short end), where it's almost a relief when the lives run out and the game ends.

If I had to compare ODST to Halo 3 (which, considering the way it was marketed, I sort of have to), I would have to agree with those that have said that ODST is "less" of a game than Halo 3. The campaign is shorter, and it only has a single, rigid multiplayer mode in Firefight. (ODST does come with Halo 3's multiplayer as a separate disc, but I don't think it's fair to consider that a part of ODST — the Xbox doesn't anyway, as it identifies the game as Halo 3. Besides, if you already own Halo 3, and especially if you've acquired all of the map packs up to this point, the only value added is the remainder of the Mythic map pack that is only available on the disc packed-in with ODST.) However, to judge it on its own, or to even compare it to the multitude of other games that have been released at a $60 price point, I think the game delivers a fair amount of value. The narrative is classic Bungie storytelling, although in a very different format than before. The gameplay feels a lot like Halo 1, which you may love or hate (but you will definitely love the return of the pistol). It's the same, excellent blending of gameplay, story, and music that has made Halo the success that it is. And if the $60 price point still feels too high, about half the retailers out there are already offering the game with deals or discounts out of the gate.

I Can Haz Recon

2009-10-05T19:22:00.003-06:00

I'm working on my write-up of Halo 3: ODST, but there's a certain side-benefit to the game. It includes its own set of "Vidmaster" achievements and the promise that, if you complete all the Vidmaster achievements in ODST and Halo 3, you can actually unlock the coveted Recon armor type for use in Halo 3 multiplayer.

What's so special about Recon? Well, to be honest, not a whole lot. Let's face it: it's just another armor type. It gives you no special advantage in the game, there are no special properties to it, you don't run faster or jump higher or take any more damage. And yet, this armor, previously available only by the grace of the employees at Bungie if you happened to "somehow" get their attention, was so sought-after that people were willing to surrender their accounts to random people just for the unlikely possibility that this purely cosmetic model skin would be unlocked for their use.

Some say the fact that anyone can now unlock it on their own diminishes the "value" of Recon. There is a point to this — this was a prize that, according to Bungie, was reserved for those who did make some noticeable, positive contribution to the Halo community. Although, the game has been out for two years, I think (and, so it would seem, Bungie agrees) the point has long since been made, and opening it up to the rest of the world isn't so bad.

And it's not like the armor is easy to get by any means. Let's take a quick look at what is involved:

7 on 7 Halo 3 — Get 7 experience points in any playlist on the 7^th of the month. When this achievement was first released, this involved finding a playlist where you had less than 7XP, waiting for the 7^th of any month, and getting the appropriate number of wins. This achievement coincided with a new per-playlist XP system, so ideally it wasn't an issue. However, to accommodate those who exceeded 7XP on all playlists really quickly, Bungie occasionally makes a new playlist around the 7^th of the month, where everyone has 0XP. Needless to say, I didn't have that problem; I had plenty of playlists under 7XP when the first 7^th rolled around.
Annual Halo 3 — Finish the last level of Halo 3 with four players, on Legendary, with the Iron skull, with everyone in Ghosts. The thing that makes this one difficult is, because of the Iron skull, if one person dies, the whole team reverts to the last checkpoint. However, making the final run on the exploding Halo in a Ghost, I think, is more fun than in the default Warthog. After doing this once for myself, I've been in a party to help others get this achievement twice since. It's called "Annual" because it only counted on or after 25 September 2008, one year after the original launch date of Halo 3.
Brainpan Halo 3 — Find all the hidden skulls on all Mythic maps. In Forge mode, you can find a skull on each of the maps in the Mythic map pack. I'm not a fan of "find all the hidden…" achievements, so I automatically go to the internet for things like this. Finding the hidden skulls on each of the six maps (three were only available with ODST's release) was trivial.
Classic ODST — Finish any level solo, on Legendary, without firing a shot or grenade. Although this wasn't super-easy, there was one level in particular where it was possible to blast through — although a slight glitch where the game seems to consider honking the horn of the Warthog "firing a shot" meant I had to do this more than once.
Déjà Vu ODST — Finish the last level with 4 players, on Legendary, Iron skull on, without a Warthog or Scorpion. This is extremely similar to Annual (hence the name), except I would argue much harder. Bungie did make it easier than it could've been in this set-up by giving you a pair of Mongooses and rocket launchers for everyone with 999 (!) rockets apiece, but it was still slow-going with many restarts and, at times, checkpoints that just refused to pop.
Endure ODST — On Firefight, with 4 players, on Heroic, survive to the start of the 5^th set. This was, by far, the hardest of the challenges to complete. In Firefight, you have a limited number of lives, and although you can earn a few more, if you run out, the game is over. A "set" in Firefight consists of three "rounds", and each round is five "waves", so in order to get this achievement, you have to survive four complete sets, or 60 waves of enemies. The game makes each round & set progressively harder by cycling the number of skulls activated. By the time you get to the last wave, all the skulls (except Iron) are turned on, so that enemies are tougher, shots do less damage, you can't recover stamina unless you melee, they throw grenades like there's no tomorrow, they dodge your grenades, and what weapons you manage to find have less ammo in them. And if you fail, you can't just restart at the last checkpoint and continue — the whole effort is wasted. I had three failed attempts of note (a fourth, we didn't even make it past the second round), all of which we got to the 4^th set (one all the way to the very last wave), and each lasting over two hours.
Lightswitch Halo 3 — Achieve the rank of Lieutenant in any playlist. This is one that undoubtedly unlocks over time if you play enough, although I managed to get it in a weekend of Double-XP Grifball.

Finally, after a very late night on Saturday and with the help of three other friends, I completed the Endure challenge, unlocking the last of my Vidmaster achievements. I now, officially, legitimately, haz Recon.

Of course, I still suck. :D

Used game sales fuel new game sales

2009-09-28T18:42:00.001-06:00

Here's an interesting tidbit. According to this article, Game Crazy noticed that a not-insignificant percentage of new game sales were paid for by trade-in dollars. While publishers whine and cry over used game sales hurting their bottom line and doing everything they can to stop it, here's a data point that shows that because people are free to sell back their used games, they then have the money to go buy a new game.

Granted, this is coming from a store that deals in used game sales, so they have a bias in putting out information that favors their business model. Still, facts are facts. I know people who do this very thing, trade in several games and buy a new game with the proceeds. I couldn't guess the percentage, but it's still interesting to add to the discussion.

The whining from the publishers, of course, is based on a faulty premise that is often applied to piracy (in fact, I contend a lot of anti-used measures are implemented under the guise of cracking down on piracy), that every used game sale (or pirated game) is a lost retail sale. In a way, it's saying just because some people were willing to spend [some lower price X] on a used copy of the game, the same people would've been just as willing to spend [higher amount Y] on the exact same game, new. It's absurd. Why not extend that to say if they were willing to spend [Y], they'll be willing to spend [even higher amount Z], and start charging $150 per game?

Meanwhile, Sony and Microsoft continue to show they just don't get it. In their quest to eliminate used game sales and gain complete control over distribution and the market itself, they continue to show they just can't compete. Microsoft continues to release games via its "Games on Demand" service at price points higher than retail, and Sony just announced that they have abandoned any plans to let users trade in their disc-based games for digital copies for their new drive-less handheld, the PSP-Go.

"Digital distribution is the future," goes the common refrain in public forums on the topic. So it would seem, the future involves getting less product (no disc, no manual) for a limited time (many, many stories of games getting lost in hardware shuffles) with less rights (can't rent, loan, trade, return, or re-sell) for more cost. Where, exactly, is the progress here?

Ghostbusters

2009-08-29T19:33:00.000-06:00

"Who you gonna call?" If you grew up in the '80s, you don't even have to stop and think about this one. The answer is automatic. In fact, it's probably so automatic, you often come up with the same answer anytime someone suggests anything remotely pertaining to questioning who is going to be the recipient of a telephone call.

The game can be best described as an "interactive movie". Written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis, it plays out like a movie, with the characters voicing dialog that sounds appropriate for a feature film. Even better, all four original Ghostbusters actors voice their characters in the game, making it very much like another movie. (There are other voice actors that reprise their roles as well.)

The voice acting is very good, for the most part. The only one I was disappointed with was Bill Murray, who didn't sound like he was "in the moment" — he read so calmly and quietly, even in times of high intensity and action, it sounded like he was about to fall asleep, when I could hear him at all.

The story draws heavily on elements from the first two movies, where the city of New York is once again threatened by Gozer. You are a new recruit to the Ghostbusters squad, and part of your raison d'être is to test new weaponry, and to give the four someone to talk to and abuse besides each other. It's a little disappointing that you don't get to play one of the actual Ghostbusters, but it does solve the question of which Ghostbuster you would actually play, letting the story revolve around different Ghostbusters at will withouth forcing you to change characters mid-story. It's a feature that works — so well, in fact, that the game's weaker moments are when you are on your own, or even with just one other Ghostbuster.

It is somewhat disappointing that the game features no story-mode co-op. Considering how well the story is written for the single-player experience, I'm not entirely sure if it would've worked to just throw a second player into the mix and get the same story experience. There is, however, a four-player online mode in what is often compared to Gears of War's "Horde Mode". Having never played Gears, I can't speak to how it compares. There are a few different types of modes, from protecting equipment from ghostly attacks to capturing as many ghosts as possible before time runs out. Beyond that, there's really not that much to say; the game play is relatively simple and fairly easy to jump into.

One of the multiplayer mode's shortfalls, though, is its complete lack of a party system. We found that we were able to get around this fairly effectively with the Xbox dashboard party system; however, it was not a complete substitution for a legitimate in-game party.

The game isn't without its faults. Occasionally, there are segments where the difficulty reaches obnoxious proportions, where you're hopelessly outnumbered and enemies keep attacking through your futile efforts at defense. And there are a couple instances where the requirement to progress isn't made clear — the game's constant prompting to "use the slime tether" doesn't really help if you don't know on what to use the slime tether. It's also not altogether uncommon to find that you've managed to slam a ghost under the ground, from where it can attack you but where you cannot reach it.

All told, though, it's not a bad game. Not only does it rate extremely high on the nostalgia scale, but it actually does a fairly decent job of turning ghost busting into a decent action game.

O Sonic, Where Art Thou?

2009-08-24T00:16:00.000-06:00

I saw this article on gaming blog Kotaku titled "Sega: Impossible To Please All Sonic Fans With One Sonic Game". It's an interesting read for me, considering Sonic and I went to college together (in a matter of speaking — Sonic the Hedgehog was released right before my freshman year, and Sonic & Knuckles came out in my senior year).

I'm certainly one of those who looks at the Sonic games today with a great sense of disappointment. The Sonic I knew was a high-speed side-scrolling platformer, games that excelled in their simplicity and playability. But when I picked up Sonic Heroes for the Xbox, I found this 3D adventure platformer overloaded with characters I had never heard of, trying to be… I don't know exactly what.

What I did find, though, is that my kids absolutely loved it. In fact, they still do. Despite the fact that I look on the game with a certain level of disdain, and I wish they would gain an appreciation for the original Sonic from the retro collection discs I have (and they have played it from time to time), the fact is, they do like this game.

Then came this Sonic Unleashed game, and you could hear the sound of thousands of old-school Sonic fans collectively screaming, "He turns into WHAT?!?" They released a demo on Xbox Live, which was a single level, with Sonic running at high speeds through a very Mediterranean-esque town collecting rings. If the entire game was like that, I would've been thrilled. My kids loved the demo, too. So I ended up buying the game for them, fearing their disappointment when they found out half the game was a much slower fighting game instead of the mach-speed running.

Imagine my surprise when they had almost as much fun beating up on Robotnik bad guys as a werehog as they did at other times.

So back to this interview published by Kotaku. I'm reading this, and suddenly, it all makes sense. If there were two bits that really summed it all up, it would have to be this one from Sega of America's VP Sean Ratcliffe regarding the criticism aimed specifically at the Sonic Unleashed werehog:

"If you read all those things, and we do — maybe not quite every single one, but the vast majority of them — and it's amazing the sort of diatribes you get. But if you sit down with a group of 8, 9, 10 year-old boys, completely different story."

And then this:

Sega's core Sonic target, in fact, isn't those who grew up with Sonic. It's those who are growing up now. "It very much is in that under 12 group," [head of Sega of Europe and America Mike] Hayes said. "And what we have to do is make a Sonic that is of a quality that delights that audience, first and foremost. I'd argue that we very much achieved that with products like Sonic Heroes[…]"

Yes, I'm disappointed in what Sonic is today. But as it turns out, it's more or less according to plan. I'm not the target audience. My kids are. And, as it turns out, they're doing very well hitting their target.

I demand my Games On Disc

2009-08-10T10:37:00.000-06:00

Microsoft is rolling out an update to the dashboard, and included in this update is the launch of a new service, called "Games On Demand". It replaces the Xbox Originals program that was available, where you could buy some Xbox 1 games, download them to your hard drive as if they were a (multi-gigabyte) Xbox Arcade game, and play — in fact, all the Xbox Originals games are being moved to this Games On Demand service. What's new is, they are also adding Xbox 360 games to this service. (They are also allowing direct purchases of these games, in real dollar amounts, using a credit card, instead of requiring the purchase of Microsoft Points first.)

It's probably not hard to guess what my opinion of this service is, considering I've complained about trading out physical discs for digital downloads on more than one occasion. Whereas some might find this "convenient" or a "sign of the future" that they can just download and go, I find it a sad harbinger of the further removal of our rights as customers. So far, the games they are releasing on Games On Demand are older games, not current releases, so the level of scrutiny will be a little lower. But I have to wonder how many times it will take for someone to wait several hours for a full DVD to download (when they could have driven to the store, bought it, and returned home in less time, probably — in any case, it certainly won't be quite "on demand", especially compared to, say, Netflix, which goes from "click" to "play" in under a minute) before they give up on the service. How many will find themselves unable to play a retail game when their internet connection drops, because their license information got screwed up in the last repair. How many will suddenly realize they can't trade in this older game. How many will complain when the first bit of retail content is removed from Microsoft's servers due to a licensing issue, and that retail game they bought is no longer available. When will the majority of the consumers realize that this "iTunes model" of digital content is no good here?

I may not have to worry. It looks like Microsoft is trying very hard to shoot this program in its own foot. Gaming blogs are already noticing that the games are way overpriced, compared with the open market on the same games on disc. (They haven't yet reported on the connection, though, that the prices are perfectly inline with their other annoying fact, that the DLC for these games is still on Marketplace, still at its original price.)

Microsoft also continues to provide way undersized and overpriced storage solutions. $150 for 120GB of storage? You can buy hard drives measuring two TERABYTES in size for two thirds the cost. So, users will be more inclined to keep their old 60GB and 20GB hard drives; and if they don't have the disk space for a digital download, it won't happen.

Mass Effect

2009-08-09T16:29:00.002-06:00

One of my Christmas gifts was a $15 GameStop gift card, and it just so happened that used copies of Mass Effect were in the $15 bin (since new copies are now retailing for $20).

Mass Effect is a gratuitous sex simulator, where you get to choose between heterosexual or lesbian scenes that you are then able to act out in detail, with full-frontal nudity and…

Whoops, sorry, was channeling Fox News there for a moment.

Mass Effect is an RPG set in a time where humans have recently begun to colonize the galaxy and are taking their place in an alliance of alien races. Your character, Commander Shepard, ends up gaining notice of the ruling council and is enlisted into the elite corps of soldiers, the "Spectres". Your initial mission as a Spectre is to track down a rogue Spectre who is conspiring to bring an ancient race of terrorist warriors to destroy the galaxy, or something like that.

Along the way, you pick up side missions and quests that add players to your party. You can pick two from your retinue to accompany you at any given time. Achievements exist for completing the game using particular people for the majority of the game, requiring replay for all the achievement points.

As referenced above, Mass Effect got some press a year or so ago for their inclusion of a sex scene. General opinions about Fox News aside, this was completely absurd. Why BioWare didn't sue for libel, I don't know, as the reports went from mere exaggeration to outright fabrication. There's no "full frontal nudity", for one thing. For another, it's not a "simulation" in that the player controls it; it's a cutscene, which for someone not familiar with videogames means a prerendered video (or sometimes realtime-rendered by the game engine, as is increasingly common these days with more powerful consoles) that the player can only watch, not control. As far as what's shown, it's no worse than what you'd see on a daytime soap opera. Now, as a relatively conservative Christian, I will say it's probably a little more than I care to see in a videogame (or a daytime television show for that matter), but considering this is part of a Mature-rated game, I don't think it's out of place.

Except for the fact that the whole romance subplot feels out of place. The proponents of Mass Effect's intimacy liked to build up the fact that the "sex scene" isn't just haphazardly thrown in for the sake of having a sex scene — it's the culmination of the romantic interaction you have with the character over the course of the game. However, the lines of dialog that seem to have any basis in romance just seem… forced. I don't know if it's bad writing or if it's Mark Meer's flat delivery of the lines (when I expressed this in the Geezer Gamers forum, others commented that the female Shepard voiced by Jennifer Hale is much more flirty and animated), but it just fails to grab me emotionally. When confronted by a female character who professes the need to talk about our relationship, all I can think is, "Why?" When Shepard says "I feel the same way about you," I can't tell if he's feeling romantic or feeling like heading to the mess hall for a pizza.

The story world is fairly well detailed. Following in Halo's footsteps, books have been released to expand the universe. Authored by the game's lead writer Drew Karpyshyn, they provide an interesting (if optional) expansion on the game's story. At this point, I've only read the prequel novel, Revelation. It's very interesting to see events unfold in the novel that are touched upon in the game. In games, you often have to take your environment and situation for granted, with perhaps the most rudimentary backstory to set it up. Karpyshyn does a great job detailing the backstory and giving it life, making this passing "oh yeah, you're doing this because of some past event" moments in Mass Effect's main quest seem more real. It also adds a little flavor to some of the side quests, as you have a greater understanding as to why a race might behave a certain way and might need help defending against another. (The second book, Ascension, takes place after Mass Effect, so although the audiobook is on my MP3 player, I'm not listening to it until after I complete the game at least once.)

Mass Effect plays a lot like BioWare's previous epic, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It is primarily an RPG. You spend the majority of your time walking or driving around, talking to people or looking for items. Combat, however, is a little closer to an RTS, although Mass Effect brings it a little closer to even an TPS. You and the selected members of your team have certain strengths and weaknesses, and presumably you pick and choose companions that give your party the right balance for the task at hand. (Or, if you're going for the "complete the majority of the game using character 'X'" achievement, you pick that one every time.) When in battle, you control Shepard in a TPS mode, and your companions start to do their own thing. You can, however, hold the bumpers, and that freezes the action and lets you order yourself or your teammates to use your special biotic powers, switch weapons, move, or attack targets.

One major complaint I have is that every command you give your team is done from your point of view, which means if you can't see the target, you can't order your teammates to hit it. I suppose if you consider that you are Shepard, it makes a little sense. You can tell your companions to be aggressive or defensive in their abilities, and if they see an enemy they will react how they see fit. Still, I definitely prefer the Knights of the Old Republic mechanic a little better, where you could switch off and "become" another member of your party and see what they saw (even if it does take you "out of character").

The missions are your typical RPG fare — explore this planet, carry this message, find these people, and kill any bad guys along the way. If a character implies that a mission must be done "urgently" or "right away", that really means "whenever you decide to get around to it". For me, that means spending a lot of extra time exploring and doing side quests instead of plowing straight down the main storyline. What can I say? When I play a game like this, I like to feel like I've seen everything there is and didn't miss something because I was in too big a hurry to get to the end. Besides, the side quests help buff my character for the main quests, so I'm not outmatched when I come across the next "big boss".

It can be frustrating when you come across a fight that you're not ready for, as it's not always entirely clear what you're ready for and where enemies of various strengths lie. Did I die because my tactics were wrong? Or are these guys just 30 levels above me? Where do I find enemies closer to my level anyway? But a very liberal save system (you can save at any time, as long as you're not in battle) makes it much easier to manage and backtracking less painful — as long as you remember to take advantage of it. And again, if after a couple tries you find that this area of bad guys is not for you until your character has properly leveled up, there's nothing that's forcing you to do that mission right now — you can leave the area without penalty (as far as I've noticed) and come back however long it takes later when you're ready.

BioWare, I feel, did a decent job with scale. The galaxy and the planets you explore all feel very large, but in "reality" they are a lot smaller than they seem, as the number of places you can actually go is very constrained. I did feel a touch disappointed when I realized this, but I've quickly come to appreciate it. I at once feel the vastness of the area I'm in, and yet I feel in control, not lost.

One common complaint that's been the brunt of many a joke on the internet is the loading times. There are a lot of them, and they are long. BioWare tried to make them mildly interesting by making them happen in elevators, and trying to make something happen in those elevators — dialog between characters, or news reports reflecting quests or events you just completed. It adds very little to the game (although I guess if you have to have a loading screen, dialog is better than a progress bar?), and the game is now coded to require this elevator ride of at least a certain duration. So, if you were to, say, install the game to your hard drive, you'd find your time spent on the elevator (especially the one on the ship, the Normandy, that appears to be powered by an overweight hamster in a rusty exercise wheel, and contains no news speaker or talkative companions to pass the time) doesn't decrease at all.

I finally finished the main story (which is why I'm finally getting around to making this blog post live). I definitely enjoyed it, especially when I got my stats up to the point where I was actually halfway decent in a combat situation. I also started a second playthrough (achievements of course), and by restarting the campaign with the same character, you can start off with the same stats and equipment you ended the last game with. I don't know if I'll be able to finish all the achievements in time for Mass Effect 2, but it'll be fun to try. :)

DLC - Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

2009-06-30T22:07:00.025-06:00

One of the arguments in favor of digital distribution is that you don't have to keep track of a physical medium. There's no disc to lose or get damaged. However, the digital copy is stored on a physical storage device — typically, a magnetic high density storage device ("hard drive" for you laymen). In some cases, you have the option to make a backup to a CD or some other storage medium (which brings you right back to the "disc to lose"), but otherwise, you're at the mercy of the selling company and its continued existence, and any promise they might have of letting you re-download a game you purchased.

One of Xbox Live Arcade's selling points has been that you can do just that — re-download anything you've ever bought at any time. It's one of the reasons they've insisted you don't need anything larger than a 20GB (or 60GB or 120GB) hard drive, because you can always delete something and re-download it later for no charge.

For the most part, that's true. And that may still be Microsoft's intent. But you know what they say about intentions — the road to hell is paved with them.

First, Yaris disappeared. Understandably, no one got very upset. Not only was it a horrible game, it was also free, so no money was lost.

Then went Lost Cities, and now go Double Dragon and SpeedBall 2. These are games people are actually paying for, and now, due to expiring licensing deals or other corporate politics, they are gone. The "delete and re-download" promise is broken. If you don't have a memory card or an unsupported device for extracting (and later re-writing) data for your storage device, you can't make a backup onto a PC or a CD-ROM or other offline storage. Even worse, if your console is repaired or replaced, you can't use the license transfer tool and re-download licenses for content that no longer exists, meaning the one copy you hopefully still have is only good for that one gamertag to play while connected to Live, until that copy fails and/or that account is suspended or terminated. Then, that's it, it's gone forever.

So to what high-profile Arcade game does this need to happen before people take notice? What if Namco Bandai went into bankruptcy or its IP was purchased by another company, which forced its titles, including Pac-Man C.E., to get delisted from the Xbox Live Arcade?

At least in that case, I'd be safe. I could still play it. I have it on the Namco Museum Virtual Arcade. It's a shiny disc that I can put into any Xbox 360 at any time, online or offline, and play it signed in under any account.

Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection

2009-06-27T13:34:00.000-06:00

The last console I owned before I got an Xbox was a Sega Genesis. I got it in high school, and it went with me through all four years of college. The system still lives in my basement. I haven't plugged it in in years, but I have found Genesis emulators and ROMs (for just the cartridges I own, thank you) and played some classics from time to time.

I remember seeing Sonic's Ulitmate Genesis Collection announced a few months ago, and it was exciting news. I never heard its release date (10 February, according to Wikipedia), but I saw it pop up on a friend's gamercard and made a special trip to Best Buy to pick it up.

The collection features 40 games and retails for $30. Not a bad deal, especially considering that the games include some of the megahit classics like Phantasy Star (the entire series, including the first Sega Master System game).

The set of games on this collection and the set that consists of the cartridges gathering dust in my basement have a very small intersection. The Phantasy Star series matches, as do most of the Sonic games (I never played Spinball or 3D Blast, although from what I've heard, I wasn't missing much). But other than the occasional game here or there, that's about it. I guess despite a friend once accusing me of being able to play Sonic the Hedgehog blindfolded, Sonic and I don't have a lot in common in our Genesis game collections.

It's an interesting walk down memory lane, back to an era where the side-scroller and platformer were king. Not only does the collection have the games, but it includes a picture of the cartridge and box art, plus interviews with some of the developers and project managers who worked on the original games. It offers an interesting perspective, especially for me, on a time when I was the excited consumer, to see what drove the producers to make these games.

Of course I have to mention the achievements. They are fairly simple, spread across a large number of the games, with no more than one achievement for any game. Most of them require you to do some very trivial task in the game, so you don't even have to play through very far. Only two or three may require some thought or finding a special trick or YouTube walkthrough.

Some of the games are downright creative, though. Of the games I had never played before, I was really taken by Comix Zone, which takes place in the panels of a comic book. It's just very different than anything I've played before.

Not that games today aren't creative or innovative; it just seems that there's so much focus on technology today, that the creativity sometimes gets lost or masked; whereas it was the 16-bit era when developers' creativity started to blossom with technology that was good enough to expose it, but not so good that it overpowered it.

But maybe that's the geezer in me talking.

Anyway, a lot of good, solid games; nice extras with the interviews and a little blurb about each game; even little things like saving states, customizing controller buttons, sorting games by name/genre/date, and assigning a personal rating. Could've been better to include Live support (friends leaderboards at least; online play probably was way out of scope for the project, even on games that would've made sense for it). Pretty easy 1000 achievement points, too. Probably won't unseat Halo for the most-played game in your 360, but if you don't have a Wii for its Virtual Console and you want to get your hands on a good Sonic game (oh yes, I went there), this'll do nicely.

Namco Museum Virtual Arcade

2009-06-26T20:09:00.001-06:00

It may seem a little odd that I'm releasing reviews to games when I can't play games, but actually, this down time is a perfect opportunity to finish up a couple posts that have been neglected while I was playing instead of writing.

According to Wikipedia, Namco has released 17 different compilations under the name Namco Museum. The one for the 360 is the Namco Museum Virtual Arcade. It consists of 34 games, divided into two sections. One is the "Arcade" section, which consists of full versions of nine games available on the Xbox Live Arcade. The other is the "Museum" section, which consists of various arcade and other release games.

Achievement junkies may at first be disappointed to find that there are no achievements for the Museum games at all. However, considering there are 9 Arcade games with the standard 200 points apiece, that does mean this disc has 1800 achievable^* points on it, which is quite a deal for a single disc. It's also worth noting that, to purchase these titles on the Xbox Live Arcade separately, it would cost $60's worth in Microsoft Points, while this collection (which includes 25 other games) retails for half that (and dropping).

^*Note that "achievable" is used here in more of a theoretical sense; some of these are fairly easy, but some are pretty darn hard.

The classic games are nostalgic and extremely frustrating. Many of these games come from the arcade, which was designed to eat quarters as quickly as possible. Additionally, the 360's analog stick and substandard D-pad were not made for precision, four-direction control, and the games do little to compensate for this. For example, when you push right on the analog stick, you rarely push directly right, but often have some slight Y-component in your direction. The game seems just as interested in your 2% down as it is in your 100% right, and you may find your New Rally-X car taking a sudden turn south when you want it to go east.

Another minor flaw is that the older games don't identify their soundtracks to the system. While one could argue that part of the reason for playing these games is to relive the arcade experience, music and all, when you're playing a game over and over again trying to get that last achievement, the 8-bit music can start to grate, and being unable to mute them or replace them with your own is a bit irritating.

One mitigating factor to the arcade games is that they all seem to be "enhanced" with the ability to start at the last level you completed. There is also some limited ability to tweak the settings to give you more lives per "quarter" or to adjust the rate at which extra lives are awarded. It may not seem like much in a generation where health is something you recover by hiding for a few seconds and lives are essentially infinite, but to someone who grew up with these games, it's entirely expected and in-context.

One thing I found rather disappointing were the "Arrangement" games in the Museum. The Namco Museum release for the original Xbox, which we have (and, fortunately, is compatible with the 360), has Pac-Man, Dig Dug, and Galaga Arrangement, which feature two-players-at-once play and are a lot of fun. The versions on this disc are not the same, as they only allow for a single player at a time. In fact, they are almost completely different games, not just graphically, but in game play as well.

Included in this collection are some newer releases, too. Pac-Man Championship Edition, while probably not quite worthy of making videogame history, is really a lot of fun. I suppose I can pat myself on the back for nailing all 200 achievement points with surprisingly little effort. Galaga Legions, on the other hand, is quite a different beast. A quick summary of my gameplay would be "oh crap I can't see what's going on where are all these enemies coming from what's that thing how do I kill it shoot shoot oh wait, did I die?" So, a lot like Geometry Wars — actually, if you took Geometry Wars and re-skinned it with Galaga designs and sounds, and added copious helpings of blur and light bloom, you'd just about have Galaga Legions. About as stingy with the achievement points, too. Good for a laugh. ;)

Still, for a value collection, it does live up to its name. There's quite a sampling of games, mostly old with a few new ones thrown in. In fact, as I alluded to before, if you were to buy just the Pac-Man C.E. and Galaga Legions games off of Xbox Live Marketplace, you would already match the current open-market retail cost of this entire disc-based collection. Plus, you can trade, loan, borrow, or re-sell this version, and if you end up playing on a different console for whatever reason and you can't connect to Live to authenticate your Gamertag and licenses, you can still play these games. What a concept.

Maybe it's not so elite after all

2009-06-23T11:42:00.000-06:00

I got home yesterday, and my kids are playing the Xbox. My son puts in Hot Wheels Beat That, and after the opening video plays and the title page appears, he says, "Why is the Xbox all fuzzy?" Indeed, the picture looked like it was coming over a bad analog broadcast over a pair of misaligned rabbit ears antennae (anyone remember those?). My older son comments how it looks just like the Xiis are displaying on the dashboard, all snowy and semi-transparent, and my wife says it must be some new feature of the dashboard.

Oh, it's a new "feature", all right, I think. Failure in rendering of 3D elements, where 2D elements such as videos and most of the dashboard are fine? Yeah, I've seen this before, right before Xbox #2 started booting up with an E74 error.

My kids play for a while. Most of the game is fine, but the signs with arrows guiding their Hot Wheels cars around the track show the same "snowy" overlay. And when they are finally done and quit to the dashboard, sure enough, the Xii is standing there, fuzzy and see-through, like a hologram on the fritz. I cycle the power, expecting to see a multilingual error message and a single red light. To my surprise, the box actually boots, although the boot animation shows some fuzziness in places. I then power down the box, and we go to have dinner.

Once the kids are in bed, I power on the Xbox, only slightly hopeful that maybe, just maybe, I'll be able to break the shrinkwrap off my Father's Day gift and play Ghostbusters, even if things are slightly "snowy". Alas, it was not meant to be. The lower right quadrant light was flashing red, and the screen displayed "System error, Contact Xbox Customer Support" in various languages, with E 74" displayed prominently at the bottom. Removed the hard drive, tried rebooting — of course, no dice.

I then took the hard drive up to my office and hooked it up to my PC using an X360USB adapter to back up as much data as I could, just in case. I didn't get as much as I would've liked, considering I started late (it took me some time to find a version of Xplorer360 that would read a 120GB drive), I didn't have a lot of free space on my desktop (I still have some home movie files I need to burn on DVD taking up hard drive space), I couldn't easily pick and choose what to back up (the 360 doesn't use easily-recognizable filenames), and I couldn't just select everything and let it fly (not only did I not have enough space, but Xplorer360 copies everything to your system temp directory first, which is on my undersized C: drive, before moving it to your target destination; I couldn't just copy everything to my data drive directly). I ended up just copying the profiles and calling it good before I fell asleep in my chair.

I then took the hard drive back to the 360 and turned it on, just for kicks. It powered on, and oddly enough, everything looked fine. It was after midnight, so I didn't want to start playing at that point, but I took some time to copy all profiles to a memory card and what save games I could (some games don't let you without logging on to the game, and some games don't let you even then). When I was done, I noticed my Xii was looking snowy and transparent again, so the moment truly was fleeting.

This is my fourth failure, and will be my second time going through Microsoft repair, as soon as I can make time to get it done. I suppose it's a good thing I haven't been able to use the license transfer tool to move all my licenses to this console.

Pre-Natal

2009-06-23T00:21:00.000-06:00

One of the big darlings of this year's E3 was Microsoft's new motion-sensing and voice-activated technology, code-named Natal. And since this is the 21^st century and any idiot with a blog can post their opinion on anything whatsoever, here is this idiot's opinion on Project Natal.

It's a gimmick.

Granted, it's a very cool piece of tech. The ability to track a person's body in three-dimensional space is very cool. And from what I've read, it does compensate beautifully for low light (and even for someone walking in the camera's field of view trying to "distract" it) beautifully.

But is it really "the future of gaming"? Is it really the end of the controller as we know it?

The idea of motion-controlled gaming isn't new, obviously. The Wii has been doing this for a couple years now. And obviously, it's a pretty marketable gimmick — they've sold a few hundred billion of these things. However, the thing I've noticed is, everyone I know who has one, doesn't use it. It's the modern equivalent of a board game — it sits on the shelf collecting dust, except for the couple times a month (or less) that company comes over, when you dust it off and gather around and play. Granted, you have a lot of fun playing; but at the end of the night, it gets put back on the shelf, never to be seen or heard from again until the next party.

Now, my impressions may be skewed by my sample set. The people I know are either "hardcore" gamers (i.e. people who grew up on consoles, who play racers or shooters as a hobby, who have a line item in their budget for games, etc.) or non-gamers (people who don't even spend time playing Peggle in a browser; for whom videogames aren't even an afterthought, but so far beyond thought as to cause them to mistake their game console for a toaster on occasion; but they have a Wii because their family or friends convinced them or it was legally required in their district). I know very few of the in-betweens (the "casual" gamers, those that do spend hours on end playing Peggle from their MySpace pages), and none well enough to know what their console gaming habits might be. These may be the ones who play the Wii day in and day out that I'm missing.

Even so, it really doesn't change the fact that it's my opinion, and my gaming style and habits, and that a Wii doesn't exactly fit.

So what is Natal doing that's different? Well, the biggest difference is, there's no controller. Instead of tracking a single point in space that you're holding, Natal is going to track all of you. So, no remotes flying off their straps, no controllers (theoretically) to lose, and no issues with batteries going dead in the middle of a game or having to calibrate or align with a sensor bar.

So is this going to be good for gaming? Well, as someone who's purchased the Live Vision camera, I haven't seen how. The camera came with a download of Totemball, which you play by moving your arms up and down to control the speed of your left and right side — move forward by raising both arms, turn right by raising your left arm and lowering your right, etc. Assuming for a moment that Natal eliminates the issues with the camera not always tracking your hands properly (and from all reports, it does quite well), playing a game like this is exhausting. There's a reason Totemball has an achievement called "Fit Player" that is described as "Play a level for 20 minutes without resting (or your arms falling off)."

Plus, it just can't possibly work to completely replace a controller. While the marketing video shows an interesting demo of a skateboarding kid doing tricks in front of the camera and having that translated into the game, I'm picturing playing Tony Hawk, where the moves you could do in the game included flipping upside down and doing one-armed handstands. Does that mean if you aren't atheletic enough to do a headstand, you won't be able to play the game? And how is this going to extend to things like Halo or Call of Duty that involves a lot of running and jumping around? Or Street Fighter or Dead or Alive, where your character's fighting moves include acrobatic flips and jumps and unrealistic manoeuvers like turning upside-down and spinning, using your legs like a heliopter to fly across the screen?

What about navigation? Wouldn't it be cool to page through movie and game listings by waving your hand? Again, I think it's going to be more tiring to go through pages of items by crossing your hand back and forth across your body, as opposed to the current method of pressing a button on a controller — a controller which has buttons for moving a single item at a time (the D-pad), moving a page at a time (the bumpers), and to move continuously with minimal effort (holding a button down). While there is a convenience factor to not needing to keep track of a controller or remote, it's much more effort to use for any length of time.

To have the option to interact with the machine without a controller in a pinch, however, is very appealing. I definitely like the idea of being able to use a free hand if I misplace the remote, or if the remote is out of reach and I'm otherwise incapacitated (either due to injury, pure laziness, or feeding/rocking a newborn baby). But that's only if it works, if the convenience of this "backup plan" isn't outweighed by the frustration and fatigue brought on by having to do repeated, exaggerated gestures to positively signal my intent.

Basically, it comes down to throw, or the amount of movement you need to push in order to trigger a reaction in the game. The camera is good, but it cannot rival the millimeters required to depress a button. Scale that movement difference up to hundreds or thousands of repetitions a night, and you can see how tired you'll get how quickly. For that matter, one of the reasons I don't spend as much time with the 360 racing wheel in racing games and just use the controller is because of the throw issue. To make a hard right turn, the difference between turning a wheel ¾ of a turn and pushing a stick an inch to the right is substantial.

And I'm still not convinced it's going to be 100% perfect. To move several pages of items from left to right, you're going to have to pass your hand from the left to the right multiple times, and in between each pass, you need to bring your hand from the right back to the left. Is the camera going to be able to determine the difference between a movement back to the left preparatory to another pass to the right, versus a deliberate movement to the left to push the list backwards?

There's also voice control and recognition. I'm not nearly as confident in this technology as I am in the motion control. My experience with Microsoft's voice recognition has been dubious at best. Will it be perfect by the time Natal is released? I wouldn't get my hopes up.

Facial recognition is another feature that is demonstrated in the video. A person walks up to the console, and Natal recognizes the user and signs them in. This, too, sounds neat, but it makes me wonder how this will work in our family of 5½. Whose face will it scan and log in when we're all sitting in our little family room?

That brings up another concern I have, thinking of my family in particular. How does it constrain input to the correct user? When you have boys who want to cause problems for each other, how do you tell Natal to ignore user A and not user B? It must be possible, as one of the E3 articles I read commented on the presenter walking in front of the reviewer on purpose to demonstrate that Natal, once "locked on" to a player, would focus on that player and ignore the distractions. But how do you tell it who is what?

I freely admit that a lot of this boils down to uncertainty in a real-world environment. "Wait and see," some might say, "and you'll see just how well it works." And that is true. One thing my wife and I agreed on as we watched the videos was that our kids are going to love this. I imagine I'll be getting this close to launch, as long as it's not too expensive. (Priced too high, and I'll be waiting for the software support and peer reviews in other homes first.) At this early preview stage, though, I'd have to say I'm "cautiously pessimistic".

At least they're reading the headlines

2009-06-04T11:41:00.000-06:00

About two months ago, I wrote a blog post about someone whose son was conned into giving up his Live credentials in the empty promise of getting Halo 3's Recon armor. The title of this post was I'll give you Recon if you give me your password, and in the post, I describe how the lure of an in-game treasure is used to swindle a poor gullible soul out of his gamertag and email account. I then say the first rule of security is, "you never, ever give out your password to anybody, no matter how legitimate they claim to be."

Imagine my surprise when I found this message in my Xbox Live inbox this week:

my email addres and password is email <redacted>@yahoo.com password <redacted>666 send me recon buddy

This appears to be a brand new user. The only games on his gamercard are Guitar Hero II and Halo 3, with his first achievement unlocked on 25 May. At the rate he's going, though, I fear he may not have his account much longer.

I like that my blog is getting read, but it'd be nice if, you know, people would read past the title.

Disney's Bolt

2009-04-29T17:53:00.000-06:00

Disney's Bolt is based on the movie of the same name. The movie (according to Wikipedia's summary — I haven't watched it yet) is the story of a dog that plays a superhero in a TV show, who is accidentally mailed across country and must make his way back to Hollywood.

Rather than playing out the plot of the movie, instead the developers chose to dive deeper into the TV show fantasy world. You play as both Bolt the super-dog (with his TV show superpowers intact), and as Penny, his owner and the daughter of a kidnapped scientist, as they try to rescue said scientist from the evil super villain.

The gameplay alternates between Penny, who uses sneak and stealth, and Bolt, who pounces on bad guys in a much-simplified hack-n-slash style.

The game is fairly simple. As Bolt, the majority of your play is attacking enemies by jumping up and pressing X and/or Y to attack, repeatedly. Once you hit an enemy enough, a "B" button icon floats over their head, and if you attack with the B button, you will grab onto them and can then press any of the four buttons to do a "finishing move".

As you progress, you'll come across enemies that are resistant to the basic attacks, and you'll have to use one of Bolt's "special powers" to stun or weaken them first. Most of the time, your first encounter with each of these will have a single instance of that enemy and plenty of on-screen tips to help you learn how to defeat them (although one particularly frustrating segment on a train introduced a frisbee-wielding maniac that seemed unstoppable, with no on-screen tips, until I happened to catch a random loading screen tip that gave me a much-needed suggestion for dodging and returning his discs).

The difficulty ramps up by throwing more and tougher enemies at you at a time, which makes the game simple, but rather repetitive.

Penny's segments are much more low-key. With no health bar, one attack means a restart. She has the ability to go invisible, giving her the power of a "sneak attack", and if she is caught, a quick-time-event button press comes to her rescue. Fighting and avoiding enemies is the minority of her tasks, though; she must spend more of her time navigating the terrain. Finding where to go is made easier by an "enhanced vision" mode, which highlights "interesting" paths in yellow.

Penny also occasionally comes across computer terminals, that she "hacks" in a minigame very reminiscent of a few Xbox Live Arcade shooters — left stick moves, right stick fires. Move and destroy everything in a 2D playing field, without getting destroyed yourself, and the terminal is hacked.

It's a very simple game, with very easy to learn controls. Some platforming parts can get frustrating, as can some of Bolt's fighting sequences when the game just wears you down with the repetitive flow of stronger enemies. There is, however, very little consequence for failure, as the game simply restarts (often fairly close to where you were), and you try, try again.

It's also a fairly long game. For a movie tie-in, there's an extraordinary amount of original content (probably having to do with the fact that it's not trying to recreate the movie). There are lots of environments, and the cutscenes and in-game voice acting are pretty well done. The game is fairly well polished. Although there are some areas that are difficult to get through due to questionable environment structure, the game is completely playable with almost no game-breaking bugs or even destructive camera controls. (My son did seem to come across one moment where Bolt somehow got into one of Penny's mission areas, where the only way out was to "suicide", but the game recovered gracefully on the restart.)

Achievement-wise, most of them are straightforward, pretty much unlocking themselves as you play the game. The "Max out health/power/gadget bars" require finding and collecting all the upgrade items along the way — most of those are easy to spot, but if you're not using a walkthrough, it's easy to miss one or two. And there are a couple others that, while they may not be entirely self-evident, are easy enough with either a little planning or a simple guide.

All things considered, it's really not a bad game. It may not be terribly exciting, as the bulk of it is fairly repetitive, but at least it doesn't feel like your typical "movie-to-game" game.

What's in a profile?

2009-04-21T23:48:00.000-06:00

I haven't had a lot of game-related news lately. Unfortunately, I have a son in the hospital, and the time where I would normally be at home playing games, I'm instead in the hospital room keeping watch over him until he gets better. However, I did get an opportunity to conduct a bit of game-related research, so I figured I might as well share.

He was recently moved into a room that happens to be equipped with an Xbox 360 (this is truly one of the finer children's hospitals), so to make his stay more comfortable, when I packed my bag for my overnight stay, I included some of his favorite 360 games and my memory card, to which I moved his gamer profile. It's a little thing, but I thought being able to sign in with his own gamertag might give him a little taste of home that he might appreciate.

The 360 is, unsurprisingly, not connected to the internet, nor does it have a hard drive attached. (The chrome DVD tray suggests that it has been purposefully removed.) I happened to get here a little late, just as he was falling asleep, which meant I could play around a bit with the 360 myself.

I booted it up, and the first thing I noticed was that it had the old blade interface. I didn't realize how much I missed it. It was so quick, so straightforward, and so familiar, even after all this time. I felt like I was looking at the "pure" dashboard again, not some clumsy façade designed to hide the "real" system from me. It was like going from Vista to XP.

The next thing I did was sign in. On the list of profiles I have on my memory card, a couple have as their gamer picture, a shot of their Xii. I was a little surprised to see this Xii picture on the "sign in" list in a non-Xii-enabled dashboard, but what is a gamer picture but a little bitmap? There's no real difference between that and any other bitmap you might download from Xbox Live for your gamer picture, and that is stored in your profile.

I knew, too, that achievement progress must be stored in the profile somewhere. Once, when I was after a certain achievement ("Knockout King" from Big Bumpin'), I was getting desperate to know how close I was getting. (My issue, as I would discover later, was that the achievement text was incorrectly written, and so when I thought I was doing the right thing to get closer to the goal, I really wasn't.) So I used a tool that let me access the 360 hard drive from a PC and dumped my profile data file to my PC's hard drive. I did this on two consecutive nights and attempted to find the bits that changed, to see where my progress might be stored and attempt to decipher how close I was getting. I never did find that out, but I did notice that the text of the achievement was in my profile. (Several times, in fact; probably a function of whatever database format they use for storage.)

It therefore came as little surprise to see that I could pull up "Achievements" and see the achievements I had earned. Although it might come as a bit of a shock to see that you can pull up every achievement, earned or not, for every game you've ever played. Included in that is the achievements' pictures. (The drawing speed was just in the range of perceptibility; I noticed games that used the same picture for multiple achievements, those achievements' pictures would "pop" on the screen at the same time instead of being drawn individually, which would suggest that achievements that share a picture might only have to store that picture once.)

It's probably worth noting that arcade trials that I had deleted from my profile in the NXE, did not show up here. Although this ability to "hide" 0-point arcade games from your gaming history is a new feature to the NXE, apparently it was implemented in such a way that hides it from the old dashboard as well. Maybe someday I'll do another data dump and see if the data's still there, just hidden; but from what I can tell, I would guess it's really not.

Without testing, I already know, too, that games can use the profile for some storage, besides just achievement details. Whether they are limited as to how much data they can store in the profile, and to how much, I don't know. But, for instance, I know that one of those Burger King games lets you create a custom racing outfit, and when you do, no game data file is saved. (The other that lets you customize a racer does use a separate data file. Whether the racer is stored in that data file, and why one uses a file and one uses the profile, I couldn't begin to guess.) I also know, when I go visit my friend Solstice01 and take my profile on my memory card, my Halo Spartan is wearing the same armor permutation he wears at home.

I would guess that my Xii is also in that profile somewhere, with the clothes he's wearing, his hairstyle, his glasses, and his wedding ring. The old dashboard of course couldn't show that to me, so that's just a guess, but there's no reason to think otherwise.

So that's pretty much what I've found. I thought it was kind of interesting. It does make me wonder just how large a profile file can get, with data from every game ever played stored in there. And with developers free to use that all-important file for storage, it makes me a little nervous as to how prone it might be to corruption. There doesn't seem to be any way to trim it, either, since game history is something that only grows and cannot be changed (0-score XBLA games notwithstanding).

But I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. Microsoft has plenty of experience coming from the Windows Registry in maintaining an all-important, monolithic database file, keeping it free from corruption and error, that I'm sure nothing could possibly go wrong…

Yeah, we're in trouble.

You want how much for that?

2009-04-06T16:51:00.000-06:00

Nearly a year ago, in my rant on digital downloads, I mentioned that part of my fear would be that, with the single entity in total control of the market, there would be no market pressure to decrease prices, and as such, prices would not decay over time.

It's time to throw another example onto the stack. After having borrowed Samurai Warriors 2 from FireMedic a year ago, I finally got a copy of my own (my kids still play and love this game). I managed to find a copy on eBay for a very reasonable $5.50 — a quick search just a moment ago show the prices tend to range from about $15 and up for new, sealed copies, and two "Like New" going for $17 and $30. Doesn't seem like an unreasonable price for a game released in September of 2006. Mass Effect, for reference, became a Platinum Hits release at $20 at the beginning of this year, and it was released in November of '07.

On 16 April of last year, the Live Marketplace launched the Xtreme Legends add-on. It adds a few extra characters and stories, but its price was a little steep at 2400 Microsoft Points — $30 for those playing along at home. I'm not sure how much the original game was going for at that time, but my guess is, being almost a year and a half after its release, it wasn't anywhere near a full $60.

If you've followed the link to the Xtreme Legends content above, you'll see that it is, at the time of this writing, still on Marketplace at its original $30 price tag. You can currently get a new, sealed copy of the game for half that cost. You can get new, sealed copies of better-selling, more recent games for less than that cost.

It only proves my point that downloadable content does not depreciate.

An apologist might point to the current "Deal of the Week" promotion (where they offer a piece of DLC for a deal each week this summer) as a counter-example. I say, it means nothing. For one thing, the "Deal of the Week" is for Gold members only, so it's partially subsidized by Live membership fees. For another, this price drop is temporary — in each case, the price goes back up to its original cost after the week is over. And for a third, the sale item is generally one of their more popular items, rather than a slower-selling item for which a price drop would really benefit.

I don't know if the person selling me this game bought the DLC or not, but of course it doesn't matter, because as we all know, you can't resell DLC, either.

I'll give you Recon if you give me your password

2009-04-05T18:00:00.000-06:00

In a certain online forum, I caught wind of someone who was very upset that her son's Xbox Live account had been hacked. He no longer had access to his Live account on the Xbox or on the PC, or his Yahoo email account.

I offered to spread the word. Hopefully, it'll help prevent others from getting scammed, and just maybe it'll help catch the guy who did this.

Well, here's what happened. The boy, who we'll call by his gamertag Vaeb41, created his account using his Yahoo email address and a prepaid card purchased in a store. At some point in his Halo game playing, he was approached by another player, who we'll call "Rhepysp iz pr0" (which at this point does not appear to be a valid Xbox Live gamertag) approached him and offered him the coveted Recon armor. "pr0" was able to "prove" that he was a Bungie employee by the fact that he had all Halo 3 achievements (including those for maps that have not even been released yet) and video showing himself wearing the flaming employee armor. Convinced, Vaeb41 gave pr0 his Xbox Live login email and password.

Of course, Vaeb41 never got Recon armor. He found that his password had been changed, the password reset "secret question" had been changed, his Yahoo email account password had been changed, and his account was basically no longer his.

They are going through Microsoft support. Since the account was not created by a credit card, it seems the key to getting it back lies in the prepaid card that was used to create the account, which they may not have anymore. (Who keeps those cards once you've used the "one-time use" 5x5 codes anyway?) Even if they do get the Live account back, getting the Yahoo account back will be another issue altogether, as that information is in the hands of another system.

It's a good time to iterate what should be the first rule of security: you never, ever give out your password to anybody, no matter how legitimate they claim to be. As an addendum to that, anyone who claims they are an employee will never need to know your password, as an employee should have whatever tools they need to grant whatever access or privileges they claim at their disposal. Ever see the warning message on MSN or AOL that cautions "An employee will never ask you for your login details or password?" It's true. The most they might need is your account name, and if they're talking to you on Xbox Live or MSN or AOL or whatever else, they already have that.

I wonder about the use of prepaid cards in this case. It seems, on one hand, it's a good thing, in that the stolen account has no credit card information attached to it. On the other hand, without a credit card account to prove ownership, it seems like it's more difficult to reclaim the account now that it has been stolen, and that it might have been easier to do it if they had this credit card available.

The UNSC M12 PRV

2009-03-24T22:00:00.000-06:00

On a more personal note, tonight my son participated in the Cub Scout Pinewood Derby. This year, he wanted to make a Warthog. I naturally was inclined to support his decision and help him with the project. :D

Click the picture below to view my Flickr set of the M12 Pinewood Reconnaissance Vehicle.

Although camouflage isn't a traditional color for a Warthog, my son's really into it lately. And it is his car, after all. ;)

Unfortunately, a Warthog isn't really built for speed — he placed 8^th in his den. I suppose the chain gun wasn't sufficient in eliminating the competition. (Although it must've done some damage; several cars had wheels pop off over the course of the evening.) I suppose next year, we'll have to use a gauss cannon.

Halo Wars

2009-03-13T14:22:00.000-06:00

As someone who put many hours into the Warlords Battlecry and Star Trek Armada series on the PC, I've been eagerly looking forward to the release of Halo Wars for the 360. The demo only heightened my anticipation, and the release has failed to disappoint. As much as Armada thrilled my geek-self by letting me control the Star Trek universe, Halo Wars does the same with the very interesting Halo universe.

One common criticism is that, for an RTS, it has been "dumbed-down" for play on the console. As someone who's played a share on the PC, I can certainly see where this criticism comes from. Certain staples of the genre, like being able to assign units to groups, aren't there. But Ensemble Studios said they weren't out to port a PC-based RTS to a console; they wanted to build an RTS that was custom-tailored to the 360 and its controller.

The results are excellent. It controls "differently" from a PC-based RTS, but for a console controller, it's very intuitive. The game has a couple brief tutorials that take you through the basics, and control is smooth and natural by the time you're done. Ensemble has done a bang-up job in making sure that everything you need to do in an RTS, you can do in Halo Wars.

Still, adding Tom Clancy's EndWar-like voice commands or Chatpad support would've been a welcome addition — not in place of, but in addition to the basic controller commands.

The cutscenes are gorgeous. The characters are finely detailed and animated, and the scenery is absolutely beautiful. If they ever decide to finally make the Halo movie, they could make it all CG from whatever was used to build these videos, and they would have a blockbuster on their hands. It's that good. I'd put these videos up against Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within easily. And there's one scene in particular where you get to see the Spartans in their prime. I won't go into details, since it's towards the end and possibly a spoiler, but I will say that's one cutscene I haven't skipped yet. :D

There is probably only one major complaint I have in this game as a whole, and that's of the mini-map. A colored reticule appears over it, indicating your current viewing angle (and those of your teammates). However, the colors are very dark, and it is very difficult for me to see most of the colors against the backdrop of the map. As such, it makes it rather difficult to find where I am and where I want to go.

One relatively minor complaint is the use of the D-pad for quick commands. I don't mind this concept in theory, but my major criterion is that there needs to be some kind of on-screen indicator of what the directions do. Left 4 Dead does this well, with a simple graphic that shows a D-pad cross and an icon at each point that shows what action goes where. Both Fable games do this, although their icons unfortunately aren't as intuitive. Halo Wars does not, requiring you to memorize that "left" cycles bases, "right" cycles recent events, and "down" cycles army groups. The fortunate thing, though, is that the consequence of pressing the wrong direction is minor and often immediately apparent, so all it takes is quickly tapping a different direction to switch the camera to the next appropriate target — it's a minor complaint, to be sure, but it can be stressful when you're under the gun and need to make a decision fast.

Another minor complaint is that I often wish I could zoom the camera out a little further than I'm allowed. It seems that I can zoom out to just about see the full line-of-sight for a single unit, but not so much for the whole army I might have selected all at once.

On my wish list, I wish I could zoom in a lot closer to units as well. You can be treated to a very close zoom when using the Arbiter's Rage attack, but you don't get treated to the same close-up detail watching a Spartan jack a Wraith tank. Also, the ability to record and play back battles would be great, especially if you could play them back from the point of view of your opponent and figure out just how he got that mega force built up so quickly. And, following along with the Halo theme, saving film clips, taking screen shots, and a map editor would've been welcome additions.

This game has certainly met all my expectations. I am enjoying it immensely (even when I'm getting overrun after failing to out-strategize my opponent). It really doesn't seem fair that this wonderful game that's selling exceptionally well came from a studio that was closed down before the discs even hit the shelves. My best wishes to the team that put this together.

The play date, after-action report.

2009-03-09T00:58:00.000-06:00

At approximately 8PM EDT, I logged on and joined MUDH0G and True Anarki to represent GeezerGamers.com as we took on the public of Xbox Live in Halo Wars. It went something like this:

Game 1 pitted us against ForgottenProxy, iTz Ge7VoCidE z, and Z3r0 1st in the Frozen Valley. The Geezers started with a rush, but the challengers were victorious in holding us at bay. While CyberKnight stayed on the defensive against constant aerial bombardment, True and Mud sent in their support and used the time to their advantage to build up their own forces, and eventually, the Geezers pushed forward and wiped the challengers out. Round 1 went to the Geezers.

Game 2, the same team of ForgottenProxy, iTz Ge7VoCidE z, and Z3r0 1st played us in a rematch on Fort Deen. The strategies were slightly different, but the outcome was more or less the same. Mud and Proxy battled back and forth in the east, with neither side giving up any ground; while True and Cyber joined forces in the west and, taking advantage of the right moment to strike, cut a swath across the north and destroyed Z3r0 and G37VoCidE in less time than it takes to correctly type their names. Still, with his teammates destroyed, Proxy did not go quietly into that goodnight. Cyber and True started the final push and ran smack into a red brick wall, with ODSTs swarming around like red ants. Odds against him, however, he eventually fell, and the Geezers won their second battle.

Game 3 saw ForgottenProxy pick up two new teammates, VUA PuR3 sKiLlZ and Kamikaze Pandax, on Exile. VUA PuR3 sKiLlZ promised to drop the hurt on us with his ODSTs and treated us to his beat-boxing "skillz" in the pregame lobby. However, when the first of his four bases fell and he failed to retake it, it became apparent he was most skilled in the art of "RAGE QUIT". True and Mud circled around and took out Pandax, and Proxy, who had enjoyed an uneasy cold war with CyberKnight since the beginning of the match, now found himself completely surrounded. With only two bases and no economy to speak of, he quickly fell to the three-front onslaught. Round 3: Geezers.

We were ready to begin Game 4. ForgottenProxy was with us for the long haul. Unfortunately, we seemed to be out of sync with the community, who were in the middle of other games while we were ready to play. (I had been getting messages and invites to play, but it was of course in the middle of our games.) A friend of True, JackJim N Jose, joined Proxy, as did founding Geezer Jamey T, for a 3v3 match on Exile.

It was a hard battle. Cyber picked up a few bases around the edge of the map early, and True held the rear, while Mud was stuck in the middle of the map. The challengers, led by Jamey and his never-ending supply of Vultures, quite nearly took Mud out of the game early. If it wasn't for some last-minute support from True and Cyber, along with Mud's Spartan that just wouldn't die, it could've been the end. But Team Geezer pulled together and saved their fallen comrade, and in the end turned it around and wiped out Proxy, Jamey, and finally Jose to win the fourth battle.

Jamey had to call it a night, so we attempted to find a replacement. Sadly, we were unable to get any responses from community members or other Geezers (even those who were showing as being in lobbies or menus), so we decided to bring in a Heroic AI to round out the challenger team for our final match on Fort Deen. (It was, of course, only after the game was underway that messages started to come in. Just the way it goes sometimes.)

The AI kept Mud harried with wave after wave of infantry. Fortunately, Cyber, who had been building up a fleet of Warthogs for base capture and recon, was able to assist, while True scouted out base locations and built up his force in the east. Once Cyber's base became the target for the AI's ground troops (with Jose's mixed fleet joining in the fun), Mud and True returned the favor and kept Cyber on life support until the danger passed. Jose and Proxy took their time building and expanding, while the AI kept the Geezers busy. When Mud and Cyber finally had enough and tried pushing through to put an end to the AI's constant annoyance, Jose was there to snuff out the attackers like candles in the wind.

Eventually, old age and treachery wore out youthful dexterity. After telling the AI "I am lying," we finally defeated the computer opponent, and Cyber used its base sites to establish a new base of operations, from which Scorpions, Hawks, and Spartans could quickly augment the Scarabs and Suicide Grunts that True and Mud kept streaming in from their respective bases.

The team of MUDH0G, CyberKnight, and True Anarki ended our 5-game streak against ForgottenProxy and challengers undefeated at 1:45AM EDT.

All in all, it went pretty well. I regret that we didn't get to play with so few people from the community. There were a lot of people out there who wanted to play, and we tried to send invites between games. I knew that, of the 60-some random friend requests I had leading up to the event, I'd only be able to "serve" a small percentage, but even then, I only managed to bring in two or three. It wasn't for lack of trying, though. Still, it made for a good time. I hope the people we played with can say the same.

Sometimes, I cheat for score.

2009-03-05T13:57:00.002-07:00

I had one achievement left in Left 4 Dead: Zombie Genocidest. Kill 53,595 infected. I had made it a goal to kill at least 1,000 a night. It was a very attainable goal, and I was doing very well. I had less than 10,000 to go. Another week and a half, tops, and it would be mine.

However, Halo Wars' release date was looming. I knew, when that came out, I would be cramming in as many hours as I could before the Community Playdate to bolster my skills (not to mention I had been looking forward to that game for a long time). I didn't have 10 days to spare.

I had seen on the internet a technique for racking up zombie kills. It was very simple: it involved coaxing a boomer to the safe room door where he keeps spewing bile on you to call hordes of zombies, standing just close enough so your melee attack hits the zombies through the door, and rubber-banding your controller to hold the melee trigger down. Two days before Halo Wars' release, I did this; and in less than two hours, I got my last 6,000 kills while I was doing other household chores, and "earned" my last achievement.

It's not the first time I've done "peculiar" things for the sake of gamerscore. Even in Left 4 Dead, I got my expert campaign achievements thanks to the "dashboard glitch" (a glitch where accepting a game invitation into the final chapter from the Xbox dashboard tricked the game into believing you had completed the entire game up to that point). Most of my Halo 3 matchmaking achievements come from the cooperation of other players, the original ones earned by setting my console language to Chinese (a technique "achievement boosters" used to find each other). Heck, just about any game that involves finding any number of hidden objects, I have completed by using a walkthrough.

Not that this should come as any big surprise, of course. Guides, cheats, and walkthroughs have been around since games were invented. Even my first Pong game had a "no fail" mode that turned your paddle into a full wall. (Ok, it was technically a "feature" that turned the game into jai alai, but still…)

On the one hand, there is a sense of accomplishment in unlocking an achievement on your own, and I admit to a certain sense of disappointment in getting my last Left 4 Dead achievement with a rubber band when I could've gotten it on my own. (And, to pat myself on the back, I definitely had an ego boost when I played Pac-Man C.E. and earned all 200 points in one sitting, with no outside help whatsoever.)

On the other hand, there is another thrill in being able to game the system, as it were, especially when you have to work with other people to do it. Whether it's as simple as inviting people into my Fable II game to pop the Dollcatcher achievement for them, or as complex as sending players to the dashboard for an invite to glitch some otherwise impossible zombie-surviving scenarios, or as bizarre as setting your console to an unintelligible (to me) language and coordinating with four complete strangers over whose turn it is to kill everyone else with the rocket launcher when your only forms of communication are gunshots and squats — there's a certain sense of satisfaction in pulling together and getting that achievement to pop, whether it's for yourself or someone else.

On the other other hand, for achievements that can be obtained via a walkthrough or other guide, there is a sense of relief of just being able to "finish" a game, to call it "done", rather than having to spend hours searching out that last coin/note/suitcase/black box/key/skull/orb.

And on the other other other hand, it all just reinforces the point that this score really doesn't mean all that much. ;)

It's a play date.

2009-02-13T09:00:00.053-07:00

From Xbox.com's Community Calendar:

Play the geezers from the Geezer Gamers website as they play the Xbox LIVE® community in Halo Wars™ on March 8. GeezerGamers is a community built for and by men and women in their thirties and beyond, who take great pleasure in playing video games. This is the generation (or the parents of the generation) that grew up playing Atari 2600, Intellivision, and the Commodore 64. Geezer Gamers is for all those with spouses/exes, kids, mortgages, who are gaining weight and medications, or losing hair and sanity. The overall mission is simple: "We want to provide a safe haven for gamers in their thirties and above to connect with other 'mature' gamers and get the most fun out of the Xbox LIVE experience."
Geezer Gamers will be online Sunday, March 8 from 8:00 – 11:00 P.M. ET (5:00 – 8:00 P.M. PT) playing Halo Wars.

I've been playing the Halo Wars demo since it released last week. I'm loving it. Even if I didn't have this commitment to buy the game, this would likely be a day one buy for me. (But it's nice to have an excuse.) It takes me back to the many hours I spent playing Warlords Battlecry and Star Trek Armada on the PC. Hopefully, my playing style won't limit me to playing only one or two games in the three-hour period — although, as far as the game is concerned, I'm already taking too long. The campaign awards you a medal based on your performance in the level, and one of the criteria is time to complete. My "build to excess" compulsion has thus far prevented me from earning a time bonus on the second mission. (The first mission has no building.)

Not that I mind, really. (Except I'd bet there's going to be an achievement or two buried in there somewhere.) Considering I'm having fun playing the game and spending as much time as possible with it, I think it's a good thing.

Is the game as complex as a PC-based RTS? Not by a long shot. There are things you can do on a PC that are hard to impossible on a console. But Ensemble did a pretty decent job in putting the essentials of a RTS on a console, and making it accessible.

I'm really looking forward to this game, not just playing it with the community, but playing the campaign beyond the first two demo levels. I can't wait for March.

True Achievements

2009-02-12T10:59:00.055-07:00

Making the news lately is a site called True Achievements. It's a neat idea. Basically, they are building a database from people who sign up through their site, of what games people have played and what achievements from those games they've earned. They then apply some calculations to assign a value to each achievement, based on how many people have played the game vs. how many have earned said achievement.

The theory goes, if a lot of people play a certain game but only a few earn achievement X, then that achievement must be hard to get, so achievement X gets a high point value. Conversely, if almost everyone who plays the game gets achievement Y, then achievement Y must be pretty easy, and so it gets a low value.

So, your "true achievement" score is a measure of how many achievements you get that are actually hard to get (or, more accurately, how many you get that are rare to get). It's much like the MyGamerCard.net "Effort" or "Overachievement" score, but down to the achievement level.

The site was relatively small, so when some of the bigger gaming sites linked to them this week, the influx of new registrations kind of overwhelmed them to the point where they had to impose a moratorium on new registrations until they got caught up with demand. I was fortunately able to sign up before this, and my score has just been calculated.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised and somewhat disappointed with how it turned out. Some of the achievements that are among my most proud, such as Call of Duty 4's Mile High Club, ended up getting a much lower adjustment ratio than I expected, despite how hard I had to work at them. Conversely, some of the achievements that took nothing but time got some of the higher ratios. And even with the adjustments, Avatar and NBA 2k6 are in my top scoring achievement list. (The reason is, TrueAchievements.com applies a ratio of 1.00 or greater. Even with an extremely low ratio, the Avatar achievement "One with Combat", starting at 300 gamerscore, stands at 302; a 50-point achievement would need a ratio of 6.00 to equal it, and the highest ratio in my bank is only 5.71 [not counting a 9.81 ratio on a zero-point achievement from Kameo].) It's not quite the "equalizer" I hoped for.

Still, it's interesting to see how rare or common some of these achievements are. I have to admit, I wasn't too surprised to see how few people were actually willing to suffer through Sneak King, though.

The site has some nice features, too, in addition to the "true achievement score" calculation. You can track your friends and their achievements as they earn them, set "to-do" lists of achievements, post solutions and reviews for achievements and games, and search for "easy" achievements (achievements you haven't earned in games you've played with low ratios).

It's a pretty neat site. Hopefully they'll be able to get all their bugs worked out and get some more servers online to catch up with demand, 'cause it's one I'd like to see stick around.

Zombies ate my game time!

2009-01-30T13:23:00.091-07:00

January is almost over. The Knight household got a small handful of games for Christmas, and I've nearly posted my reviews of all of them. The only ones left to go are Mass Effect (which I bought after Christmas with a gift card received then) and Forza 2 (which was more of a "spur of the moment" purchase; details to come later). The only thing keeping me from posting the reviews is that I like to feel that I've spent "significant time" with them, to make sure I have a good grasp on what the whole game is about. It used to be "completed the game", but then I slacked off to just "completed the main storyline", but this month I figured I needed to back off from even that or I'd never get anything posted.

The problem is, there's been one game that's been nearly monopolizing my game time for over two months now, and that's Left 4 Dead. When we get the kids to bed and I sit down in front of the Xbox for my "me time", it's what I want to play. I know I owe a lot of that to the Geezer Gamers community; because L4D is such a team-based game, and the number of Geezers nearly guarantees that I can find a team to play with, that actually communicates, acts like a team, and plays to have fun. Whether it's helping each other get achievements (I finally have all of them except for the "kill 53k zombies" one, which will just take time — at my current rate, I should get it by April), venturing into matchmaking to take on the timmies, or just playing the game for the sake of playing, I have been loving this game.

It does, unfortunately, mean that other games are getting completely neglected. WALL·E, for instance, only took me two days to finish the main storyline. However, those two days were over a month apart. My friend Solstice has gifted me some Forza cars that I still have yet to see, simply because I haven't even logged on with that game in 2½ weeks. And in Mass Effect, my Commander Shepard is only just now about to embark on his quest as a Spectre, having completed the preliminary "get to know the game" bits.

The thing is, I do want to play other games. When I get an invite to play Halo, I want to accept. But when I'm deciding between suiting up in a metric tonne of UNSC armor, and grabbing a health pack and some ammo and running in a tight squad with three companions for our survival, I pick the zombies every time. Why? Because I know I'll enjoy it. Win or lose, I know I'll actually play and have a good, fun, and exciting time. What more could anyone ask for?

Hmm, maybe more hours in the day that I could devote to gaming.…

WALL·E

2009-01-26T01:13:00.000-07:00

Based on the movie is the game WALL·E. Being a typical videogame-of-a-movie, the game more or less follows the plot of the movie. You start off as the title character, doing some simple cleanup tasks on Earth all by himself. Much the same way the scenes in the movie introduce you to the character, the scenes in the game introduce you to the basic controls and mechanics.

The second scene brings in EVE, which instead of platforming and puzzle-solving instead introduces flight and speed. It can be a little frustrating, as the controls are very loose. There are also time trials that can be very frustrating, as the goals aren't very explicit. One that comes to mind is a trip through a boat. You have to take three passes, and there is one section of the boat where you choose which of the three paths you are going to take. You can only take each path once. Unfortunately, it is not clear that this is what you must do, and when you try to take the same path a second time, you are forced to another path in a move that often crashes you into a wall and doesn't indicate that you have to pick a different choice. This killed me more than once until I guessed the developers' intent.

The third scene gets more interesting, as you get to play as WALL·E and EVE together. It's back to a platforming dynamic, but with an added dimension of flight and the ability to shoot with EVE's cannon.

The game continues to follow the story, where you play as WALL·E, EVE, or both, depending on how the story goes. Your typical videogame elements have been added, such as tokens, collectibles (including, for some odd reason, Toy Story movie characters), and health units (solar recharge stations).

One annoying feature is that, to play multiplayer, one must first unlock the multiplayer stage by collecting all the tokens in the associated level in single player first. The tokens aren't entirely hidden, but it's not trivial to get 100% in a level. I'm not a fan of games that require unlocking multiplayer anyway. Multiplayer should be something that you can just jump into with your friends and family without having to wait for a single player to play through the game.

My kids seemed to enjoy this game well enough for being able to play through the story (and my two-year-old, who was saying the title character's name since the day he first saw it in the "Coming Soon" section of another Pixar DVD, loved watching), but once they finished the main storyline, they really haven't had a lot of interest in going back and playing the game again.

It's a fairly typical movie-to-video-game adaptation. Graphics aren't bad, but unimpressive (you certainly won't confuse it with the movie itself), gameplay is pretty straightforward, but not a lot of replay value.

Mirror's Edge

2009-01-24T16:03:00.000-07:00

Mirror's Edge is an interesting game. It's a first-person runner, where the primary gameplay involves running across rooftops performing feats of acrobatics to get from point A to point B, avoiding the gun-wielding authorities. The demo really engaged me, so I decided to pick this one up (and my wife made me wait for Christmas to open it).

One impression you get in the demo is that you're encouraged to run rather than fight, finding a way around enemies rather than through them. Unfortunately, as I'm finding out in later levels, the opposite is tending to be true. I'm coming across more and more levels where there are more people that I have no choice but to fight, as attempting to run through will get you gunned down in three steps or less. And with no gun of your own, this is nearly impossible. (You can take an enemy's gun and use it, but the achievement for not doing this even once in a campaign suggests an encouragement not to do so.) "Take them one at a time" is easier said than done when five come at you all at once.

The game can be frustrating at times. It's very much based on flow and momentum. If you know exactly where you're going and the path you're taking to get there, it can be very satisfying to string together a sequence of runs, jumps, tumbles, and slides that just flows from point A to B. However, finding the right sequence or even the right place to go is an exercise in trial and error, not to mention patience. Sometimes the controls don't respond exactly how you'd expect, either, where you'd expect a wall-climb ends up with your character lying flat on her back with the wind knocked out of her (if you're lucky).

Despite that, it still is a very interesting game. It's so unlike anything I've ever played, and there's a definite thrill to being able to run across rooftops and leap across buildings. Although it can be frustrating, once you do find the magic path that flows across the map, the rush when you do it is quite a payoff.

There is some DLC that is being released for it that reduces the game to its basic, fun play, where you just run through time trials through some abstract aerial tracks. It is something I look forward to spending some points on, when I get back to playing it.

I'm glad EA decided to take a chance on this unique game. Unfortunately, it may be something we see less of, with the economy being what it is, there have already been murmurings that a game that's as different as this is from the mainstream is unlikely to get recognition again. :( I know my wallet may regret spending full price on this, but I'm certainly glad I threw in my support. It's a good game.

Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts

2009-01-19T16:23:00.001-07:00

As I alluded to in the Banjo Kazooie review, I preordered this game for the kids when they announced that preorders would be rewarded with the original Banjo Kazooie game. Having never played a Banjo Kazooie game, I didn't know what to expect.

My kids weren't too impressed with the Banjo Kazooie arcade title (insert rant about kids these days not appreciating their roots here), so as Christmas approached, I started to worry if they would have any fun with Nuts & Bolts.

The games are very different. Although they do share some common themes (collecting "jiggies" and notes), the mechanics are extremely different. Instead of platforming, the bulk of the game is played in vehicles. You start the game (after an introduction sequence that re-introduces the characters, unfortunately picking up the story after Banjo Tooie which I also haven't played) in "Showdown Town" with a trolley that is little more than a tray on wheels. You drive this tray around town, finding boxes that contain vehicle parts and shuttling them back to the garage.

You unlock worlds as doorways out of Showdown Town, and in these worlds are other challenges that must be completed with vehicles. In some cases, the vehicle will be predefined; whereas in others, you have the option of building your own (or choosing from a number of predefined) vehicle for the task, whether that task is racing, escort, battle, defense, or other miscellaneous tasks. You are then awarded notes (the game's currency) and/or jiggies based on how quickly you complete the task, or how many goals are accomplished, or how much/little damage is inflicted, etc. (A nice feature is that, upon completing a challenge, you can immediately see the leaderboard and see how you did compared to your friends. Unfortunately, the last night I tried this, attempting to apply the "friends" filter locked up the Xbox, every time. Although I used it a lot before that night, I've been scared to use it since, for fear of Something Bad Happening.) Improving your score may come from finding a better path, or it may come from building a better vehicle.

Building a vehicle is remarkably simple. In Chromehounds, I often found it very difficult to build a mech that had the correct balance of attack and defense, maintained proper weight-to-power ratios, and a whole host of parameters I couldn't even begin to understand, let alone try to name off the top of my head. Nuts & Bolts makes building a vehicle remarkably simple. Parts can almost be added anywhere on the vehicle. Certainly, if you build one too tall, it will be prone to tipping, and if you build too wide or have pieces sticking out, stuff is likely to break off the sides in narrow tunnels or making tight turns. But if you keep things reasonably balanced, the vehicle will work. If you have a pair of wings on it, it will fly; and even an unbalanced plane won't be terribly difficult to control in the air. If your vehicle looks like a boat and has a couple flotation devices on it, it'll make a decent boat.

It's so simple, both my 8- and 6-year-old boys can build vehicles and race them around the test track, and have a lot of fun doing it.

In fact, that's what they do, most of the time. My 8-year-old will spend more time in the other worlds accomplishing tasks than his younger brother, but both boys will spend considerable time in the garage putting together mammoth vehicles that would crush a Hum-Vee. And despite their size and unwieldy shapes, they will fly, drive, or float just fine.

The game itself is full of self-referential humor. There are nods to other games in the series (Banjoland appears to be a museum based on the Banjo Kazooie game; there are other signposts that reference events in Banjo Tooie that I unfortunately won't recognize until that game hits the Marketplace) as well as other games produced by Rare (a level that takes place inside a "next-next-gen" video game system sees you walking over spinning CDs of Grabbed by the Ghoulies and Viva Piñata — "The Best Game That No One Played" it says on the CD — and one jinjo has Banjo retrieving a scary book that happens to be the WotNot book from Kameo). While I'm sure there are a lot of references I'm missing (especially having only played Banjo Kazooie, Kameo, and the Viva Piñata games personally), I still find it highly amusing.

I thought that maybe Banjo Kazooie would be required to play this game. After spending time with it, I feel that it does help get an appreciation for the series as a whole, and the self-referential humor in particular, but the game mechanics are so different that from strictly a gameplay perspective, it's not necessary.

My son is much farther in this game than I am (since most of my time is spent killing zombies these days), and he's starting to find there are some challenges that are a little frustrating for him; but he is still spending a lot of time with this game. Perhaps it's because he spends more time building and testing new vehicles than actually playing the storyline. But that's ok. He's having a lot of fun with it, and that's what matters.

There is a multiplayer option. Unfortunately, I haven't yet experienced this, as most of the Geezer Gamer family is either shooting zombies (yay) or locusts (boo). Hopefully we'll get around to trying this. Someday. :)

Hi, can I have your password please?

2009-01-11T19:04:00.001-07:00

I got a Live message from one of my friends last night asking me to visit http://xbox-profile.com/CyberKnight so I can claim my social networking account that they had supposedly set up for me. It encouraged me to do this "quickly", before someone else claimed my name.

I decided to check it out. As a quick trip to Google will show, my gamertag isn't the most unique word on the net, so there was some incentive to checking it out before someone tried claiming my name. When I visited the site, it redirected me to a page on Playfire.com that asked me to confirm my ownership of the gamertag by entering my Live ID and password in a simple web form.

Erm, no.

The only form that gets that information is one that submits to Live.com.

Tonight, I noticed that I got four more messages from other friends that all say the same exact thing. It sounds like this phishing scam is getting a few bites.

I hope for the sake of my friends that this site is doing exactly what it's claiming — verifying ownership of the gamertag — and nothing more. But I've sent my friends a message (and am posting this on my blog as a "public service") encouraging them to change their Live account password as soon as possible, just in case. This can be done by logging on to http://login.live.com.

If Playfire.com stores that information, they could use it to take control of the gamertag, plus any and all associated Hotmail, Messenger, or other Live service accounts. And of course if there are any credit cards associated with that ID (such as would happen if you buy Points or renew a Live or Zune Pass subscription online), then the new owner could use that information to make more purchases.

It's already apparent that they use your login information to access your friends list and send out messages on your behalf to your friends to come and sign up. And if the apology messages from my friends are any indication, this happens without the explicit knowledge or authorization of the account holder.

I tried connecting to Playfire.com today to get more details for this blog post, but the entire site appears to be down. It certainly seems more suspicious.

Lego Batman

2009-01-02T14:50:00.001-07:00

Bought for my Lego game-loving son for Christmas, we got the newest game in the franchise, Lego Batman.

It's essentially the same basic game as the other Lego games — you play as a pair of Lego mini-figs (the second being computer-controlled by default or by a second player, who can jump in and out at any time; and you can swap players at just about any time as well). You walk through levels smashing up scenery and collecting the Lego studs from them, which fill up a stud meter for the level. You also build things from stacks of pieces around the level, find minikits, fight enemies and bosses, ride vehicles, etc. Completing a level unlocks it for "Free Play" mode, where you can play through with the ability to switch to any unlocked character on the fly, a requirement for collecting some minikits that cannot be reached by any one character's abilities on its own.

This time, of course, you play as the Dynamic Duo, and the bosses you fight against are from the history of the Batman franchise. At least, I assume so. I have to admit, I'm not that well-versed in Batman lore. Fortunately, at the start of each stage, the game gives a little background on the boss character you're going to face — their real name, their alias, and a very brief history. Very nice for those of us who never knew there was a "Killer Croc" or "Man-Bat" character.

Whereas other Lego games gave your heroes additional abilities through new characters, in Lego Batman you play the hero missions exclusively as Batman and Robin. In order to give them new abilities, there are suit upgrade pads that you can build in the level. Switching Batman into his "sonic suit", for instance, gives him a sonic gun that can shatter glass. The levels are of course designed to give you just the right suit to get through the main story of the level, but not necessarily the bonuses (like minikits), which require coming back in Free Play mode.

Game play is much more similar to the original Lego Star Wars series than Lego Indiana Jones, in that it is much more action-oriented than puzzle-solving. You'll find yourself doing a lot less carrying items back and forth and a lot more just moving forward, running and pounding (until you start "unlocking" some of the minikits, which do take more thought).

You play through three stories as Batman and Robin, with each story taking one super villain (Joker, Riddler, and Penguin) and each chapter in the story taking a "lesser" villain (Poison Ivy, Harley Quinn, Clayface) helping him out. The gimmick this time around is, once you play through the story as the heroes, you can then play through the same story as the villains. The chapters are very different, so it's not like playing the same story twice.

The biggest difference in this game from the others is that it doesn't spoof any specific movie. Unfortunately, that does take something away from the classic humor quality. Instead of spoofing memorable scenes, the humor tends to be rather generic. It starts out fun, but eventually the same old "Batman's being all stoic and serious while Robin's being a goofy kid" jokes repeated in every cutscene start to get a little old.

Although the game is fairly easy to pick up and play, new players and even veterans might find it a bit confusing, as the game is not exactly forthcoming with how some of the mechanics work. I try to play a game not taking things for granted, waiting to see what it tells me to do rather than assuming I know how to play. Part of this is trying to make sure I learn what the game wants to teach me, part is so I can be a better reviewer, but mostly it comes from playing games with people who don't play as many games as I do. I've found if I try to share a game I like with someone, and that person doesn't have the same passion for games and just "knows" certain gaming conventions like the back of their hand, then my lack of explanation of things I take for granted is going to make their experience that much worse.

Similarly, it seems that Lego Batman takes for granted that you know what you're doing in a Lego game. There are some helpful tips about using grappling hooks and batarangs — things specific to this game — but if I waited around for the game to tell me how to build a pile of jumping Lego pieces, I'd be waiting a long time. Vehicle modes were worse. Even though it did actually give basic instructions like how to use the tow cable, it never told you where you were supposed to tow the enemy vehicles once you got them. While it's true that some goals have to be discovered, typically the game gives you some clue as to what the goal is, such as with a "mini-cutscene" that shows the villain taunting you from the target area with the camera focused conspicuously on a weapon target point. The vehicle levels didn't give that kind of clue. It took way too long for my son and I to figure out where to tow the enemy cars, or where the Batwing picked up its torpedoes and how to replenish them, or where the Batcopter could get bombs that it could tow around; and we're seasoned veterans of the Lego franchise.

The Batcave computer is a bit of an enigma as well. I think I figured out that red bricks unlock the "Suit Upgrades" section, as I've found two of them and I have two of those available to buy. But there are other bonuses that are locked and don't appear to have any indication as to what has locked them. I found two bonuses that got unlocked, and I'm not sure why, or even what those bonuses do.

I think this game makes a decent continuation of the Lego franchise. I definitely couldn't recommend it as an introduction to the series, as it takes so much previous Lego game knowledge for granted. But all in all, it is a pretty good Lego game.

Hot Wheels: Beat That!

2008-12-31T17:41:00.000-07:00

There's really not a lot to be said about Hot Wheels: Beat That! This was a game purchased for one of my kids, who likes playing with Hot Wheels cars, when my wife found it on sale at Toys 'R' Us.

It's a very simple game. Controls are a little loose, but it's not too difficult to stay on course, and in general, in cases when you are blown off course or into a hazard, you are returned to the track quickly. You pick up weapons by driving through rings, and fire them off with a touch of a button. The weapons are fairly simple and traditional, ranging from a missile to a mine to a smokescreen, with a few more interesting weapons, like a shocker, a parachute that slows your target down for a time, and an EMP that destroys the weapons your opponents may be carrying.

Game types include the traditional races to the more goal-oriented "destroy X opponents in Y seconds". Each race, in addition to giving you points (or "flames") for earning first, second, or third place, also gives you two secondary goals, like use a weapon so many times during the race or simply obtain and use a power weapon. The secondary goals also earn you an extra "flame", and the accumulated number of flames unlock more races and better cars from the garage.

Multiplayer is all local, and can be played as a race with (or without) AI, or in a combat mode, where you score points by hitting your opponent with a weapon. Unfortunately, the cars and arenas in multiplayer are unlocked by playing single player, which limits the fun friends and family can have just jumping in to play this game until a single person does the work to unlock everything. (I really hate this requirement.)

The environments vary from a bedroom to an attic to other around-the-house locations. Race tracks include standard Hot Wheels tracks (although wider to allow three or four cars to race side-by-side), household elements (like plastic cups, with the bottom removed, to act as a short tunnel), and the fantastic (puddles of radioactive goo). The raceways can get busy and hard to see at times, however there tend to be a decent supply of arrows guiding you along the correct path at any given time.

All in all, it's not a bad game. The game play is very simple, something that's almost better suited for an arcade game than a retail release. It is worthy of note that, of all the games the kids got for Christmas, this one seems to be spending the majority of the time in the Xbox. It's simple, arcade-style fun.

Nice game you're downloading; shame if something were to happen to it...

2008-12-30T10:56:00.005-07:00

I've ranted against the move from physical to downloadable distribution before. It's still a subject that I get very passionate about. I've avoided blogging about it, though, because otherwise I'd turn this into one big "SAVE THE DISCS" blog, and I'd much rather talk about games than stupid stupid marketing decisions, but I came across something that really got my blood boiling again.

This Ars Technica article describes an experience attempting to buy the infamously-DRM-riddled game Spore in downloadable form. In a nutshell, when you purchase and download the game, they maintain a record of this transaction and allow you to redownload the game for reinstallation at any time — for six months. You are given the option to extend this "protection" interval to two years for the price of $6.99. After that (with no option to backup the installation files to a CD), it is gone forever.

As the author points out, this means if you intend on getting a new computer beyond two years from the date of the game's purchase, or if your hard drive ever crashes and needs replacing, you're out of luck as far as the game is concerned.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Digital distribution has never been about customers' "convenience"; it is and has always been about control — seizing control of the distribution, sale, and after-sale. They eliminate manufacturers and shippers and the money paid to them, they eliminate retailers and their cut of the profits, and they eliminate the customers' ability to re-sell their used games on any market. They also eliminate borrowing and renting from the equation (unless people start getting in the habit of lending out their whole PC). Every player of the game must play an individually-purchased copy, with 100% of the profits coming right back to the publisher/distributor (with the savings passed on to their executives' bonuses). Any additional restrictions that might cause a person to have to pay for the same game twice is just icing on that cake.

Banjo Kazooie

2008-12-29T12:27:00.001-07:00

As an encouragement for preordering Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, one could get a free download code for the original Banjo Kazooie for Xbox Live Arcade. This is essentially a port of the old Nintendo 64 game, except the graphic engine has been retooled to take advantage of higher-definition screens and widescreen aspect ratios. The characters are still rather low in the polygon count, but as comparison videos reveal, the result is much sharper and cleaner than one would get simply hooking up an N64 to a modern TV.

This deal was a no-brainer to me. I figured a couple cartoony platforming characters would make a good upcoming Christmas gift for the kids, especially with the game retailing at $40; but when they added the free download for the $15 arcade game, that clinched the deal.

I never played the original Banjo Kazooie on the Nintendo 64 (my brother didn't even get an N64 in the house until after I left for college), so these characters were all new to me. The game is a faithful reproduction of the N64 game, though. In fact, when I got stuck in a couple places and found myself looking for help on the internet, it was a walkthrough of the N64 version that led me to the missing pieces.

Overall, I'd have to say it was a fairly enjoyable game. It is a very simple platforming adventure, with very old-school goals, like "collect all the notes". And it has some of those frustrating elements that older games still used, like the concept of "lives". (Or have we just gotten spoiled by being able to endlessly fail and retry?) There are certainly some frustrating elements, such as twitchy camera control and narrow ledges at great heights that are awfully unforgiving of missteps caused by twitchy camera control. And I never did quite get the hang of the "beak bomb" maneuver. But there were some really classy tricks, too, like the way the music seamlessly changed styles as you walked from one region to another or dove underwater.

I played a little of the Nuts & Bolts demo, and one thing I noticed was that it was really light on character orientation. I don't know if it was removed from the demo or if it's not in the game at all, but it does make me wonder a bit if it's not in Nuts & Bolts at all. Nuts & Bolts (from the demo; haven't played the full game yet) focuses on the vehicles you can build and drive. (In fact, in-game loading text recommends getting Banjo Kazooie from XBLA for classic platforming.) But things that had me fairly confused in the Nuts & Bolts demo (like the mechanics of swimming) became clear when they were introduced while playing Banjo Kazooie. It makes me wonder if Banjo Kazooie isn't just a handy prequel to Nuts & Bolts, but is rather a prerequisite. Time will tell when it comes time for that game to come up in the post-Christmas rotation.…