2013 Year in Review

When reading over our mission statements, I do wonder if I have lost sight of anything.  Actually, I wonder that whenever I post, and I just used the mission statements to reinforce that belief.  Or something.  Anyhow, it is true that I originally spent more time reminiscing about my life and video games, and the influence games on my life.  However, posting at this blog has guided me to become more involved in the video game 'scene' as it were.  Really, the scene is made up of many different 'scenes' and I'm mostly interested in Art Games, Retro Games, free indie games, and higher production indie games available on Steam.  

This was a big year for non-game, games.  2012 might get a little mixed in here, since I don't really distinguish the two years very well, but I've played a few games that bend the rules about what video games are.  So far there's:  Proteus, Dear Esther and To the Moon.  And I'm also set to play Gone Home and The Stanley Parable.  Pretty excited about those two.  And about these high profile games that are so non-traditional.  

Because, let me tell you, when I returned to the gaming scene, I was appalled at how completely saturated it was with First Person Shooters.  I was never a huge fan of the genre, but to my understanding, there are so many generic shooters out there that even big fans of the genre are getting over-saturated.  I guess the good news is that the over-saturation of fps market has created a greater interest in non-traditional games like the ones I listed above, four out of five of which are from the first person perspective.

And then there's Portal.  Technically a shooter, but you don't shoot bullets, you don't shoot people, you shoot walls, and you create portals.  Beautiful and awesome, I still love this game, and had a great time playing through it again.  I also played Portal 2, which suffered a little by being, in my opinion, too long.  I also wasn't that into the whole 'gels' thing.  But I did just the other day get to play co-op mode with Jaconian for the very first time.  I had a great time and I can't wait to do it again.  

There is so much more depth in games than I am experiencing, and co-op mode reminded me of that.  We were just hanging out, playing video games (before we were rudely interrupted by a broken internet connection on my end).  It was nice.  I thought of my non-gaming friends who might not have such an easy time getting into hang-out mode with someone who lives hundreds of miles away.  

Okay, resolution time:   I resolve to play more online co-op (not hard, since my total games last year were 0).  I resolve to work harder on my more complex posts, rather than rushing them out at my self-imposed deadline.  As an amendment to that resolution, I'd like to actually finish the posts about the Console Wars and Graphics in games that I began over a year ago.  Also, to finish knitting the scarf I started, and one more too.  I also learned to knit this year - it's a excellent thing to do while watching TV or movies.  

Alright, acheivement unlocked:  New Years Ramble.

Happy New Year,

-Dr. Potts


P.S.  Here's some lists for the new year:

My Favorite gaming podcasts:  Experience Points, Brainy Gamer, A Life Well Wasted

My Favorite games I played this year:  Proteus, FEZ, SuperBrothers:  Sword and Sworcery EP

Top games I desperately want to play again, but don't have access to:  Journey, Barabari Ball, Nidhogg

Games I desperately want to play for the first time, but don't have access to:  Mario Galaxy 2, Zelda: Windwaker HD, Monster Hunter 3

My favorite posts I can't seem to finish:  Console Wars, What I mean when I talk about Graphics, Tecmo Bowl

My favorite Online video Programs relating to video games:  Extra Credits, PBS Ideas Channel, Hey Ash, Watcha Playin?

The consoles I am most nostalgiac for:  NES, SNES, Playstation 1

Consoles I would buy if, y'know, I had a TV and some extra spending cash:  Wii, Playstation 4 (it's backwards compatible, right?), Steam Box (just 'cause steam is awesome)

P.P.S.  Oh yeah, I lost my job in August, and proceeded to couch-surf for the next four months.  I guess that was a pretty big developement, huh?  Right.  Well, I discovered that even with a bunch of extra time to game, I don't play any more video games than before.  I guess I feel like I earn the time to play more when I'm paying rent.  But I'm going to pay rent at a house with a PS3 come January, so we'll see what develops!

First Impressions: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth (PC)

Whoops.  I guess I should have saved my previous post looking back at 2013 for my actual last post in 2013.  I just miscalculated and didn't look at a calendar to confirm my horrible counting skills.  Brain farts aside, let's do another First Impression since Steam's Winter Sale Extravaganza is coming to an end in a few days and a "few" games were purchased.

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is a game developed by Headfirst Productions and released by Bethesda Softworks, yes, that Bethesda Softworks.  The game was released on PC and Xbox back in 2006 after being in development for close to four years, so it kind of looks like a PC game from an evolving era.

Now, I'm a sucker for a psychological horror game (a la Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem) based on some of the works by H.P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu (hereby referred to simply as Cthulhu) promises not to disappoint.  Even the opening "Warning" promises the game to play against you:

Now, for me, Cthulhu has some mighty big shoes to fill since for me Eternal Darkness did so much right and with the perfect amount of difficulty while still maintaining a consistent level of "fun."  Presently, after two hours, the only "sanity effects" that I have witnessed have been a shaking of the screen while staring at corpses for too long.  That's a good start to things.  I don't want blood dripping down the screen and my character screaming 15 minutes into the game as there's nowhere to go from there.  You have to start out slow, building the tension.

The Wikipedia article for Cthulhu will tell you that the game has been known to bug out.  Some glitches causing the game to stop working all together or in my case, causing the game to freeze for a second, usually when I click on something in order to examine some abysmal horror, or you know, a first aid kit.  One bug that I have experienced that consistently freezes the game is after you reach Innsmouth and you're ducking around behind buildings, you enter a room and spot a corpse hanging from the ceiling.  The camera zooms in on this body and upon returning to your normal field of vision, the game is stuck.  I can still tilt my view left and right, but moving does not happen.  This happened twice.  I have yet to try and enter said building without looking at the hung corpse.  Luckily though there is a  save spot just outside the door so I do not have to go too far to find a work around.

Once reaching Innsmouth, I became a little conflicted as to the story in the game and potential/intended surprises.  I have read The Shadow Over Innsmouth and I have recognized certain things that are important points in Lovecraft's story.  These are touches to characters and the environment that I wonder if someone not familiar with the story would notice or see as important.  Presently, it genuinely feels like a video game adaptation of the story, which I am not complaining about, but because of how faithful certain details are, I do wonder if there will still be an element of surprise in the story.

One thing that I have noticed is in the writing of journals and diaries from NPCs and the main character.

Now, maybe I'm just being overly anal, but the above passage does not sound as if it were written by a young man in 1922.  The writing sounds very contemporary, which kind of takes me out of the 1922 New England setting.  Maybe it's just because Conklederp and I are reading ghost stories published around the same time.

Another aspect to the game that I am excited about is healing.  The inventory screen shows not only what is in your inventory, but also the health status of Mr. Jack Walters.  

When you bring the cursor over your body, a screen comes up giving you the ability to "repair" different areas of your body with stitches, bandages, splints.  I am kind of excited to see the character with a splinted leg, bandages around his arms and maybe some sutures on/around the facial region.  I am, however, not excited to be in that situation with creatures potentially chasing after me.

So yes, two hours in and despite the occasional bug/glitch, I am enjoying what I have been playing.  Now to see if I can make it through despite the often commented on difficulty of the game itself.  Here's to hoping.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Let His Soul Forever Burn

As a parting gift (of sorts), here are two more screen shots that I did not find a place for in the body of the article.

Jack Walters at his desk, looking over documents before leaving for Innsmouth in 1922.

The cheery hotel lobby in Innsmouth.

So happy new year everyone, and thanks for everything.

Video Game Maps

I've been thinking about maps lately.  Fictional maps, specifically.  Great fantasy authors like  J RR Tolkein, L Frank Baum, George RR Martin and a newcomer named Ian Silva -- have grasped the power of maps to draw a viewer in and to lend a new dimension to a fictional world.   I'd like to draw special attention to Ian Silva's Maps as they are the only one of this small collection that are of a Modern design, but they also contain a history of a fictional society, and 100 years of baseball records.  

In the case of video games, maps come in different forms.  Overworld maps in RPG games are the most prevalent, where players will navigate the continental structures of the given video game world.   The navigation of an overworld is often aided by a sub-map which displays the entire planet, highlighting the players current position in a 'you are here' style.  

There are also Dungeon maps, made popular in the first Legend of Zelda.  And there is another style of map which you can find on a website I just found, called VGMaps.com - The Video Game Atlas.  This website uses screen captures to map out entire games, from the NES, SNES and even Nintendo 64, among others.  The database is extensive, and if you were a former Nintendo Power subscriber, you might lose some time wandering through their library.

VGMaps is an old site, it just celebrated its Tenth Anniversary.   It reminds me of the old internet, when commercial interests hadn't moved in, and everything you could find was put there by dedicated people, doing it out of love.  I miss that internet, but I don't think it's ever coming back.  Still, there are sites like VGMaps, more like outposts in deep space, or oases in the desert.  Or something.

Anyhow, go have a look, have fun.  They're doing a Map of the Month thing, and the one for December is from a Japanese Sequel to Paladin's Quest that I never heard of.  Enjoy

-D

Year in Review ~ 2013: Year of the PC

Well damn.  Only four days left in 2013, which is hard for me to imagine considering that I remember at the beginning of the year thinking about resolutions, none of which I kept.  I had planned to write 10 songs this year and paint "more" miniatures.  None of that happened.  What I did do though, was become more deeply rooted in PC gaming and I read more books (including comic books a la The Walking Dead).

2013 began with my computer in the shop after spilling a beer (again) onto the keyboard.  I gave the first two games in The Elder Scrolls series a go, two posts which seemed to be pseudo-popular with our target audience.

Looking back at what I've written, I noticed that the first half of the year I dedicated a lot of time to 3DS play while the second half of the year, there was very little in the way of 3DS games that I reviewed.  Of course not to forget the PSP, of which I only reviewed a single game the entire year.  And yet, I still like the PSP as a gaming platform, I don't use it as a portable gaming platform as I do with the 3DS.  I've noticed that I predominantly play the PSP whenever I'm home, which then presents the dilemma that since I'm at home, why don't I just play one of the many PC games that are gathering dust on my hard drive?

But really, 2013 was The Year of the PC for me.  My PC games library grew from something manageable to something that I'm surprised hasn't started reproducing on it's own.  And actually, reproduction has occurred with a couple of the games through Steam.  In one of the auto updates, Anna added an "Extended Edtion" without my knowledge.  Left 4 Dead 2 Beta became something that sparked questioning throughout the Steamverse for a week or two.  You're welcome Linux users.  Company of Heroes was released with a "New Steam Version" and since I haven't played any of those games from one of the Humble Bundles (back before they became an every day/week/month sale thing).

It was also the year that I visited both Kickstarter and Indiegogo a few times to back games that I wanted to see made.  Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, but I really would have like to have seen Shadow of the Eternals be made and Precursor Games stay around as a game development company.  I will see Beyond the Sleep and Darkwood come into fruition sometime in the coming year, so I am happy that at least two indie game companies are able to see their vision.

I will sometimes think back about what the mission statement that Dr. Potts and I had for when we created our little space here in the electronic void.  In our pre-production days, the thought of doing predominantly "retro games" was an idea that looked very tasty, and looking back throughout the year, I 've realized that that is something that I have not personally done a lot of.  I blame my lack of components that allow my SNES and N64 to be played on the schnazzy HDLEDC3POTV that sits six and-a-half feet from me.

I also found myself watching more-and-more over at LoadingReadyRun.  I guess I just have a thing for Canadians:  Nathan Fillion, John Candy, Caroline Dhavernas, Dave Foley, Ryan Reynolds, Jewel Staite, Conklederp.

So I'm now going to cut myself off before I continue to ramble on more than I already tend to do (thanks Dad).

Happy New Year everyone.  I don't want to say "Hopefully 2014 will be. . ." because I thought 2013 was a pretty damn good year as far as years go.  It wasn't the all time greatest year of the year, but that would be rather hard to beat.  Now, I don't want to make any promises, but in the coming year, look forward to more reviews that are/will be at least 6 months behind the release date of the game, or if you're lucky, it might be upwards of 20 years late.  But that how we do here.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Hanging Out With No One But Me

Full Review: Dead Island (PC)

What says "Christmas" more than being on a tropical island?  How about killing thousands (my total came out to 3,641) of zombies and their ilk?  That's where we will spend our post (albeit a day late).

50 hours, 38 minutes later, roughly, I completed the main campaign for Dead Island, playing as the fallen copper, Purna.  For my First Impressions of the game, you can read about that here.  This however will be the more traditional full-on-review.

STORY

As I mentioned in my FI, not comparing the game to the announcement trailer from 2011, the story in the game is somewhat lacking.  The game opens with your character waking up after a night of partying/binge drinking while on the fictional island of Banoi, off the coast of Australia/New Zealand/Papua New Guinea, hence all the Australian-esque accents.  When you come to, everything has gone to shit.  Zombies have very well established themselves as being a part of this island world.  It really feels like something that would have taken at least a couple of days to happen, but it appears that events happened only over night.

Throughout the game you are able to locate articles titled "Facts" although accessing them is something that I was unable to easily figure out.  You also find audio recordings left by a journalist.  At first it seems plausible that you just happen to be following the exact same path as this journalist-man, but when you find the last recording, why he is "there" doesn't make any sense.

There were some story elements told through cut-scenes that also didn't make much sense.  Thankfully this game didn't use cut-scenes to tell the story of the game (as if you were playing a movie), but were mainly used as transitions between pseudo-key events.  Even then, there were a couple of times when I felt that the cut-scenes were revealing information that I felt like I was supposed to have known earlier or would leave me confused as to what just happened.

Throughout the game, you travel between the beach side resort area, downtown Moresby, the jungle, laboratory facilities and an offshore prison.  The frequency of changing locations is nicely paced.  There's the first stage of getting used to an area, the second stage of being familiar enough that you know where you're going and the final stage of being tired of said area and wanting to go somewhere else.  Then there's the nostalgia factor when you revisit a previous area and you're happy again.  This is done very well here.

The game ended with a boss fight that also didn't make much sense.  It felt like it was tagged on at the end to give the game a Resident Evil feel to the end after the game was finished and some executive/producer said, "There's no boss fight?  Throw in a monster that we haven't really seen yet and have it be that guy.  Now rewrite that one part in the game so it makes sense why he's a bad guy, ignoring the 90% of the game up to that point."

GAMEPLAY

As previously stated, the controls took me a little bit to get used to, having just come from playing Left 4 Dead 2 and being familiar with that control setup.  The keyboard layout was "relayouted" and axis' were inverted and all was right as rain after an hour or so.

Now, I'm sure that somewhere online there are FAQs about how to properly build your character.  Yes, build.  Dead Island is an FPS with RPG skill tree elements.  As you kill zombies (and the occasional human with a gun), you gain experience points and level up.  When you level up you have three skill trees that focus on either special attacks,  or increasing HP, types of loot drops and increasing the integrity of weapon customization.

I already stated that I felt that certain aspects of Dead Island felt like it played like an online game, a claim which I am able to make not having played m/any online games.  But the fact that there were times when I would get mauled by one or two zombies (walkers, infected) and die very quickly, only to respawn seven seconds later.  I stand by my assertion that death wasn't something so much as something to be feared as it was something that was a great inconvenience.   During the final boss battle, I stopped caring about using my health packs as I knew that I could get a couple shots in with the shotgun and do a bit of damage before I died and especially since the boss did not regain any noticeable amount of health whenever I respawned.  I was basically an immortal god who just lost consciousness frequently.

GRAPHICS

I had no issues with the graphics.  There were two cut-scenes that skipped a bit, but nothing too distracting.  Overall, the game looked really good.  I wasn't going in expecting life-like semblances of limbs strewn about the place.

Regarding the zombies and their types, with the exception of the Butchers and Tanks, I felt that there was enough variation in who I was killing.  I liked that I didn't feel like I was killing the same five zombies over and over.  Also, depending on which area you were in, the clothing changed, although sometimes heads were reused, but that didn't bother me.

SOUND & MUSIC

I was very pleased with both the music and the sound effects used in the game.  Specific zombie growls were easily recognizable and when wearing headphones, it was a lot easier to tell from which direction the attacks were going to come from.  There was one particular sound effect that was never explained, which I kind of like, but at the same time, I wish that I knew what was going on.  Throughout the game (I think it was present in all areas) there was the sound as if a zombie (possibly a Thug) was being broadcast over a loudspeaker, possibly after having it's legs cut off.  I found that this sound was occasionally unnerving especially while trying avoid large groups of zombies.

FINAL THOUGHTS
I think it is safe to say that I enjoyed Dead Island as I spent 50 hours playing the game.  There were times when I got frustrated with the frequency of dying and respawning seven seconds later and felt as if I should be playing with other people online, combined with the 164 times I died, that works out to dying every 18 minutes.  At times, the game really felt like it was a mash-up of Skyrim and Left 4 Dead 2, which are two games that I really love playing and Dead Island did both of those games successfully, and while not a perfect combination of both games, it certainly achieved its goal, despite the weak ending.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Destination Chaos

Free Indie Titles I have played recently

Chatchat

Flash Game.  I feel bad giving away anything about these games, sometimes.  But I'll tell you that Chatchat is an online multiplayer game, where you play as a cat.  If that appeals to you at all, I suggest you go play.

Here is a review of chatchat that I think encapsulates the play experience nicely.

Game Title

I originally found this game through an article at Indie Games Magazine.  This one you will have to download.  It is available for Mac and PC.  I guess that this is a Zelda-like.  It's pretty cool, and pretty darn lo-fi.  I don't play a lot of these low-fi games, so I'm having fun with it.  The teleporter item is awesome.  I like it when games drop you in and give you very little direction.  As long as they're not too hard to figure out.
It took me three plays and about an hour of play time to complete.  The second time through I got stuck, but I learned most of what I needed to know in the first to plays, and managed to finish on the third time.  One piece of advice I can give before embarking on this game is to conserve your bombs, you don't want to get stuck with no bombs when you really need one.

if you like this game, there is also sequel.

Lesbian spider queens of mars

A Free Flash Game.  This game plays like an 80's arcade game.  The only controls are up,down,left,right.  The pace increases frantically, and there are small details that change between levels, even though the overall level designs are similar.  Great cinema graphics too.

*beware of loud advertisements*

Verge

Verge is a free flash game I originally played on the Winnitron SJ at the cooperative gaming co-op, around this time last year.  It's a nice looking platformer, with very basic controls, and an interesting atmosphere.  There is a world on the reverse side of the normal world, where everything is upside down, and the way you get to it is you die.  Later there are also pools you can enter which are gates to the reverse world.  This mechanic and some switches and blocks build the puzzles.  There is also a really nice, haunting piano melody for the bgm.  Check it out if you like 2d platformers in a 16-bit style with an edgy atmosphere.  


-D


P.S. if you're going to play any of these sorts of free games using a gamepad, you will want to download Joy To Key.

First Impressions: Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together (PSP)

Wow, okay.  I bought Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together because I liked the look of the game, I'd heard nothing but good things about the Tactics Ogre/Ogre Battle series and because the game was on sale when I bought it through Amazon back in December 2011.  I started it up, but then relinquished my PSP to Conklederp since she was just getting into Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions, which I had suggested she try out, so that was my own doing.  Jump ahead to February 2013 when I restarted the game as I had no idea where I was supposed to go or what my motivations for doing anything was and I played on-and-off until April.  I don't remember what happened back in April, but I've finally picked the game up again a couple of days ago.

I've actually tried writing this article a few times and each time I go off on tangents about certain aspects of the game which leads to a history of this game, Final Fantasy Tactics and tactics games in general.  But lets get down to things about the game, which is why this article is in existence.

It's a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics.  The look of the game, the character design, the complicated political plots that are reminiscent of something you'd find written by George R. R. Martin.  I don't understand all of the political intrigue and back stabbing, but I'm sure that that epiphany will surface on it's own in the later chapters.  Even the music is composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto (FFT, Vagrant Story, FF XII).

What's interesting and much welcome about TO:LUCT, similar to what was done in FFT:TWotL, is a historical record of sorts is kept in game by a "historian."  This means that I can go back and look through a timeline of important events and watch cutscenes of said events.  There's even a record of NPCs and their backstories before the events in the game take place.  The game is detailed in a way that allowed me to pick the game up after not having played for nine months and I felt I knew what I was doing and why I was making those decisions.

One drastic element that is added to this game is the ability to rewind turns during a battle to have them replay differently.  For instance, you move your mage over a couple of squares to a better vantage point on an enemy who is already being attacked by one of your own fighters.  You cast a fireball spell that accidentally hits your fighter in the back of the head.  Or if you moved a thief to a spot you had thought was going to give you a tactical advantage, but then that thief is gang-killed.  You have the ability to rewind time to any point in the battle.  For posterity sake, the game keeps track of how many battles you won using this feature.

Two very much welcome features to this game happen when you're losing a battle.  First off, your characters do not permanently die.  I found this out during a boss battle and thought that I would give up the life of one of my characters as I just won a difficult (~45 minute) battle.  As my characters timer reached zero, they said something about "living to fight another day."  When the battle was over, they didn't gain any skill points, but they did gain some XP.  The second thing about losing, is that if you are about to lose a battle completely, you can, with the click of a button, retreat from that battle.  You will then gain some skill points and some XP, but obviously not as much as if you had won the battle.

Battles in TO:LUCT are about as cumbersome as they are in FFT, but that's one of the reasons why I fell in love with FFT and why I really like TO.  Conklederp will confirm that my swearing increases ten fold every time I'm in a battle; if it's missing an attack chanced at 80% accuracy or being gang-killed.

Okay, I'm going to limit myself to talking about only two more aspects that I love about TO.

First.  Apparently the music in the game has been re-orchestrated and it sounds great.  Granted I didn't play any of the original releases of this game so I cannot say "how much" better or worse it sounds, just that it sounds very much like Hitoshi Sakimoto. And, and, AND!, there's a music player included in the menu that also has a notation from the Hitoshi Sakimoto or the arranger Masaharu Iwata about the song.  How flipping awesome is that!?  I love that Square Enix acknowledges the music side of the game to include information about it's composition.  This should be standard in every video game.

Lastly, is the "Personality Test" based around a fictional tarot deck, that is supposed to alter (slightly?) the game based on your answers.  I have no information about how this actually happens, but the questions themselves, I felt, put you in the mindset that this world won't necessarily be a friendly one and that tough choices are ahead.  Below are a couple of my favorites.

XVI: The Tower

A Fire engulfs your home.  Whom do you save from the flames?

-My Beloved

-My Child

-My Parents

(I love how this question is worded.  It's stating that all three are in a burning house, but you can only save one set: your beloved, child or your parents, then watch as the rest die).

XVII: The Moon

In a fit of passion, you take your friend's lover.  What will you do next?

-Keep the lover for my own

-Savor the moment

-Put it from my mind

(The added layer to this question is self imposed, in that I already have a fiance.  So in this instance, I knowingly take my friends lover, running the very high risk of ruining my current relationship, what then would/do I do?  No one is coming out of this unscarred).

So after a nine month hiatus, I'm back into this game and I'm really liking it.  There have already been a number of times when the story split based on a decision that I made and each time I've questioned if I made the right one.  Granted I could "go back" to see what would have happened if I made a different decision, but I don't want to know that, at least right now.  I want to live with the consequences of my actions.  I feel that's where a lot of character development (implied or self induced) comes from and I don't want to rob myself of that emotional experience.

In closing, if you've played Final Fantasy Tactics, you will not at all be disappointed with Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together.

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Instrumental

Link Post, December 2013

X-Manatees... why?  Why not?

Hi there, everyone, I'm looking to fill some space between postings, so here's a series of unrelated links that I've accumulated over the months and years.  Mostly game related, though some are just nerdy.  Like for example, above you see the Manatee version of Phoenix of X-men fame.  This is one in a series of X-manatees by jharris.deviantart.com - original, to say the least, and well-designed.  

Another fun thing I saw once was a blurb entitled 'if Super Mario Bros were released today' - it's a series of design jokes, with special attention to tutorials, achievements and DLC.  Pretty funny, I think, and such a early, fundamental game like Mario is a great place to make points and jokes about game design.  

Speaking of fundamental games, I learned the term 'mother dough' from an article over at the Brainy Gamer.  He's borrowing the term from the world of baking, and I think the concept translates well.  The idea being that a game like Mario is the 'mother dough' for many platformers to follow -- but if you dig deeper, then you might see it was Donkey Kong that lay the groundwork for Mario.  Anyway, go ahead and read the article for more details.  Love that Brainy Gamer.  

And, trailing off from the Brainy Gamer subject, there's a cool little article by Scott Juster at Experience Points about the overworld theme of Final Fantasy VII.  He says that he doesn't know much about music, but I enjoy his analysis.  And it was a nice way to revisit Final Fantasy VII without having to play through the game again.  I give that game a lot of shit, but that overworld theme is pretty darn good.  (BTW, Scotts youtube link is outdated, so here's a new one:  FFVII Overworld Theme)

  
Alright, well, I guess I'll cap this off by mentioning the Game Music Bundle.  It's a new bundle I found out about.  Of course, the bundle is over now, so it's ... well, it doesn't seem like it has a purpose.  But anyway.  I think it's a cool idea, and given this last one was Game Music Bundle 6, I can imagine there will be another.    


Okay, okay, alright, alright.  I am not out of links to post, but I think this is enough for now.  Enjoy!

-D

Zelda Fan Art

Well, I don't have a post for you all, so I thought I'd just go through some of my bookmarks for some sweet video game art.  Fan art, on a whole, is an incredible thing.  Some amazing stuff bubbles to the surface on the internet.  Like that sweet Ganon picture up there.  Isn't it totally awesome?  That image is part of a series of of Legend of Zelda images I found over at this place called the Zelda Dungeon.

I really appreciate the art style, and I also appreciate that it is all images from the original Legend of Zelda game on NES.  We've waxed about nostalgia for this series before, and about the potential it may have lost over the years.  Images like this remind me of that potential, of how these simplistic critters could look totally sweet and how there could be a rich mythology behind the happenings in the Zelda games.Also, it reminds me of all the cool names the baddies in Zelda have:  Gleok, Dodongo, Keese.

The artist is called Deimos-Remus at deviantart.com.

Also at Zelda Dungeon, I found an interesting article about Skyward Sword that used terms like 'skill scaling'   'sub optimal dominant strategy' and the like.  I love this game theory stuff, and I harbor dreams of being that kind of a smarty pants and getting to talk about video game design all day.

The writer for this article GaroXIcon, and I like him so far.  In addition to the above article, he pitches a direct sequel to A Link To The Past, and says that Majora's Mask is his favorite game of all time.  How do you like that?  GaroXicon is my new video game critic crush.  and Deimos-Remus is my new video game art crush.

-D

Film Review: The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug

Conklederp and I went out last Thursday night to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, it being the midnight-opening night/morning showing of the movie.  There were a handful of people in costume (a crossdressing Thorin and Thranduil; Gandalf, a Hobbit, Galadriel), which was nice to see.  Conklederp did make the observation that (at least) for our line for the non-Imax 3D version, we were one of the older people, asside from the parents.  The theatre wasn't nearly as full as I would have thought as most of the front groups of seats were empty.

For the most part the audience was fairly well behaved.  I should say that my "perfect movie audience" is one that doesn't talk (or move around) during a movie.  Noises are okay, but only if they are a vocal response to fear, surprise or laughter.  "Noises" do not include "Holy shit, that's fucked up!"  when you see something frightful; "Waaah, that got me!" when you are surprised; or "Ah man, that's hilarious!" at a funny scene.  Before the movie started, a girl came back from smoking some pot (an observable fact, not a judgement) outside and proceeded to rock her chair back frequently and kept hitting my knees.  I would have asked her to stop, but I don't think she realized she was doing it and I don't like confrontation, especially with teenagers.  So after Conklederp and I moved over one seat to the right, the person behind me kicked the back of my chair just less than a dozen times during the course of the movie.  Lastly, after we had moved over, two guys sat in the open seats to my left and the one right next to me said to his buddy, "I'm not into this whole Hobbit crowd."  Sigh.  Once the movie started (after the previews), he opened a can of beer.  The beer didn't bother me, it was the fact that after finishing said beer, he pulled the tab off, opened/peeled back a portion of the top of the can and proceeded to use it as a spittoon for the rest of the movie.  The only thing missing from this guy was a can of axe body spray and a bucket of Stetson.

Okay, all of that aside.  So how was the movie?  For the most part I enjoyed it.  It is definitely going to have to be a movie that I see again.  Like the first movie, this one diverges a bit from the book, but unlike the first movie, this one diverges even more.  Granted it is still The Hobbit, there is just more material relating more to what Gandalf was doing before the events in The Hobbit take place as well as what he is doing regarding the Necromancer while Thorin and Company are in Mirkwood Forest.  Tolkien has said that he took Gandalf away from the Dwarves so that the events in Mirkwood with the Spiders, Wood Elves and Erebor could happen without the convenience of a wizard and came up with some busy work for Gandalf.  That works well enough in the book, but in a movie that deals with the world of Middle Earth and all the events that conclude with the Lord of the Rings, there would need to be a more detailed explanation.

I had originally thought about doing a list of what I liked and didn't like about the movie, but that turned into something that I wasn't ultimately happy with.  That's not what I set out to write about.  Yes there are somethings that I wanted to bring up that I didn't like, but those involved spoiling a movie that came out yesterday.  Even with a "Beware - Spoilers" disclaimer, I don't want to be that person.  So now I will just write in specific generalities.

I often feel like movie sequels suffer from a word that I don't know if it exists or not.  I'm trying to refer to "the look" of the movie, from Part I to Part II and so on.  I think I noticed a bit of it here, but I will really need to see the movie again before making any final judgement.

I liked the look of Beorn, although I thought he was a little too forgiving about finding his home full of Dwarves.  Maybe there's more material that was cut so that the Dwarves and Bilbo could get into Mirkwood faster.  It's a possibility.

Mirkwood was great.  I really felt that the filmmakers captured the belief that a forest is sick, can be disorienting and how it can play tricks with your mind.  Simple camera tricks worked great here.  I will hint that when the spiders talk, it makes sense.

I thought Lee Pace as Thranduil, King of the Wood Elves of Mirkwood/Greenwood the Great did a fantastic job.  At first I thought him a little stuffy and closed off, but then I thought of both Thingol and Turgon and I immediately felt better. 

One point of contention since it was made public was the character of Tauriel, a female Elf created for the movie portrayed by Evangeline Lilly.  I will say that as a whole, I thought Tauriel a believable Elf in the film created universe of Middle Earth.  I don't have a problem with her existence.  Maybe a little shaky on some of her motivations that I won't get into now, but you'll probably see what I mean when you see the movie; or maybe you see all new ones that bother you instead/more.

I am a little sad that I have mixed feelings about "the look" of Bard/Luke Evans.  It is true that he does look a lot like a slightly older Will Turner/Orlando Bloom from Pirates of the Caribbean and that's very unfortunate as I found it a little distracting.  That's probably just something that I need to get over for myself.

Smaug looked amazing.  If you've read the books, you'll know that Smaug isn't around very long.  He's introduced to Bilbo, they converse, Smaug gets pissed and flees the mountain and heads for Laketown.  There he burns some building and finally gets shot down after a couple of passes.  I will just say that I understand the filmmakers' decision for having "more" of Smaug and while on screen, they didn't do any disservice to the character.  The one thing though was that I felt that Smaug's conclusion to Bilbo's "barrel rider" riddle came too late for him to have his expected reaction.

Lastly, I will say that the movie, which clocked in at 2h41m, it ended before I thought it was going to.  I expected something a bit more at the end, but it looks like that that will happen near the beginning of the next movie, which we will have to wait another 360+ days for.  And, now that I know what changes were made from the books, less questioning about where the movie was going and less worried about if things were not going to be done at all, I definitely plan on seeing the movie again (hopefully next time with a better audience) to see if my First Impressions change and if I am able to come away with different or new thoughts about The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.


~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
Instrumental

FEZ: revisited

FEZ may very well be a masterpiece.

The attention to detail, visual design and editing really come through.  This game has been meticulously crafted, and I love it.  It's almost like a challenge just to enjoy all the fine details.  

Contrary to my first impression, I now see that the movement is consistent.  The puzzles are amazing.  How does he do it?  The learning curve is steady and challenging.  Once you learn to use the map system, the game opens up.  The little graphical details are delightful.  This is truly a love letter to 2d platform gaming with a really well conceived and executed mechanic.  Bravo!

Fez is not a clone of anything, and it is proof that the retro platformer can still be innovative.  If I were to estimate the mechanical level of FEZ, I would guess playstion 1/Saturn/Nintendo 64 era, but it's hard to tell.  The game is so dense, that I experience some slowdown at times, yet I have no problem emulating the PS1.  The number of little sprite animations is awesome, and may just be a bigger processing strain than I give it credit for.

My one nit pick thus far is that I can't control the camera zoom.  I'd like to get a closer look sometimes, but I am unable to do that.  This is a bummer.  

Also, this game brings to mind Voxels.  I haven't played with them much except for the first Humble Bundle I bought, the Humble Voxatron Bundle.  Voxatron was a fun little 3d shooter made of blocks, like Minecraft and Fez.  What an interesting developement for 3d games:  3d blocks, rather than polygons. I'm for it!

I'm playing FEZ in a little bit of a different way than usual.  Usually, I game in about 2 hour sessions, but with FEZ, I'm playing in half hour sessions.  I like it.  I find that I hit a wall at about a half hour, and rather than struggle, if I just put the game away, I will be refreshed the next time I start.  

In conclusion:  FEZ is very nearly a perfect game.  It is rare to find a game with this level of detail, few come even close.  A triumph of design and editing.  

-D

P.S.  Many thanks to Daniel Featherstone for encouraging me to stick it out with FEZ.  

And Thus, Do We Begin Anew?

Roughly 68 hours is the amount of time that I've currently invested in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind.  That's quite a bit of time, but not necessarily so for a sandbox game (do sandboxes still exist?).  That being said, I just started doing the main quest portion of the game.  Whut!?  For those who have not played Morrowind, I was told by the main quest giver to go out in the world and learn some things, gain some experience before coming back.  I took that shit to heart and now Valgrin of Markarth has become the guildmaster of the Fighter's Guild in Vvardenfell.  With the exception of an in-game week spent trudging around Solstheim, most of my time was spent trudging throughout Vvardenfell, typically to areas that I could not travel to either by boat or Silt Strider.

So I feel like I am at a crossroads of sorts.  For nearly 70 hours I have been playing as Valgrin of Markarth, a Nord from the Skyrim Province.  The story of Morrowind is that your character, as I currently see it, is The Nerevarine, a reincarnated Dunmer (Dark Elf) general from 1E-416 (roughly 3828 years in the past) who will reunite the fractured houses of Morrowind and banish all outlanders/foreigners.

So here is my dilemma.  Why would a Nord be the one that reunites the houses of the Dunmer?  Wouldn't it make sense for their "savior" to be of Dunmer blood?  Do you think that an entire nation would rally around a foreign born person whom some people believe to be this, Nerevarine?  Not to mention that there are some houses that are purely secular and vehemently oppose the Nerevarine Prophesy.  Why not then create a Dunmer for this story to make sense to me?

This is where I am at.  Also keep in mind that I have only completed the first quest in the main questline. I do not think that Bethesda and Zenimax are foolish enough to create a storyline that would only make sense if you chose a particular race.  I feel that there should/needs to be an explanation as to why the Nerevarine could potentially be a female Breton who dabbles in magic and not the expected male Dunmer tank.  I need to believe that this is possible.

Last night upon realizing that in the main quest that my character would most likely be the Nerevarine, I saved the game, paused it, looked over at Conklederp and simply said, "Ah, well shit."  I then tried to explain my feelings without sounding like a complete anal retentive idiot.  I think I may have succeeded.  So I went ahead and created a new character who would follow a different path than Valgrin.

I present to you Tal'aq Nevalu.  A Dunmer, originally from Firewatch in the North-East of the Morrowind Province.  In 3E-412 Tal'aq was imprisoned in the Cyrodiil after attempting to steal from an Imperial caravan headed for the Imperial fort.  Of the five theives that attacked the caravan, three were killed, one escaped and Tal'aq was captured.  Because two Imperials were killed during the skirmish, Tal'aq was sent to the Imperial capital to be imprisoned for crimes against the empire.  Tal'aq spent 15 years in the prisons of the Imperial City, until Uriel Septim VII begins sending those born under a specific birthsign.  In 3E-427, Tal'aq is chosen as one to be sent to Vvardenfell and is given a pardon upon reaching the shores.

***BREAKING NEWS***

While doing research for this article, I have discovered something that might "allow" me to continue to play as Valgrin and complete the main questline.  So Indoril Nerevar died/was killed in 1E-416 during a war with the Dwemer against the Nords at the Battle of Red Mountain.  So, so, SO, it could be possible that Indoril Nerevar could have been reincarnated into the body of a Nord due to their connection around the time of his death.  This little bit, may be the thing that validates using Valgrin for the remainder of the main questline.

That being said/discovered, I don't think I will get rid of Tal'aq Nevalu as I would like to experience the different storylines associated with the Thieves Guild and I might even (eventually) create a mage-type person to complete the quests of the Mage's Guild.  That's just how I like to play.

So thank you Two Boys and Their Blog, for possibly saving me from having to bulk up a new character (although it is a character I like) in order to complete the game and possibly add another 30+ hours before finding out what happens with the main story.  Whew!

~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian

Have We Lived In Vain?