This one's for Matt

I hate to tell you this, buddy, but Titan Quest developer Iron Lore has closed its doors forever. Not enough people appreciate mythologically-themed Diablo clones, I guess.

The bastards.

Got my money’s worth

I can now say I have completed the entirety of The Orange Box. This came out in October of last year, and I have been playing it pretty consistently ever since. Of course I took time off from it to play such great games as Mass Effect, Super Mario Galaxy, and plenty of Halo 3, also many other games, but I can say confidently that this game entertained me (and it ain’t done yet!) for a solid four months.

The reason I say I have finally completed it is on account of my own imposed regulations. Because Team Fortress 2 is a multiplayer team shooter, I decided that the moment I got the Hardcore achievement (15 pts.; get 1000 kills) I will have “completed” Team Fortress 2. The 1000th kill was a great one, nearly symbolic of the scope of human awesomeness in its epic quality. Here’s how it happened:

After playing two matches, I saw that I was within reach of 1000 kills with one more match (thanks to the handy achievement point tracker all games in The Orange Box have). We were storming the second checkpoint on Dustbowl. There were a bunch of pesky turrets within range of a choice sniper shot, so I, thinking only of the team and not my gamerscore, switched to the Sniper class, one I rarely, if ever, use. As I took aim at the turret (one charged up shot can take them out) I saw through my scope a hated Soldier coming my way. I backed up. He came at me. I aimed with the scope. While backpedaling to avoid his rocket, I squeezed the trigger—BAM! Headshot on the Soldier. *Bloop* “Achievement Unlocked: Hardcore” It was a great evening for gaming.

I also finished Half Life: Episode 2 last week. This game is the high point of the Half Life series. While Episode 1 was fun and interesting, Episode 2 really shines. The variety of gameplay, the great storytelling, the characters, and the wicked final fight against the striders all come together to make it a great experience. Oh, and the ending! Very cool.

Now maybe enough time has passed that I can play Portal again and it will be like new. Maybe I’ll never put down The Orange Box.

Oh Indie games.... I can't stay mad at you!

Indie games, I love you.

I recently revisited the Indie game “flOw” built by Jenova Chen. It’s a simple free flash game that involves ummm… swimming, I think, and uh, eating things. And then you switching levels. And then you evolve or devolve or ….. WHATEVER it’s cool. And addictive. Games these days come with thick instruction booklets and many game styles, so it’s refreshing when you play something that is just as fun but has no instructions and needs only one button.

I do kind of resent that this free game is now for sale for $7.99 on the PS3 store. That’s unless the majority of the profits are going to the original inventor. Similar to “N+” ninja game that is now for sale on the Xbox live for a handful of points.

Well, if you feel like trying these games out on the web, flash style, click the links.

But my personal “WTF, no instruction” favorites are the Hapland Trilogy. Let me know what ya think.


http://foon.co.uk/farcade/hapland/

http://foon.co.uk/farcade/hapland2

http://foon.co.uk/farcade/hapland3

Sometimes a girl is just a girl

If you enjoy the things that go beep the way we do here at LBGD (which sounds like a group that should be having a pride parade), you've more than likely tried Portal and fallen deeply, deeply in love with it. Portal is, as near as I can tell, a perfect game. Its concept is simple, its controls, elegant, and it's exactly as long as it needs to be. The fact that its creators are a couple of girls right out of school is at once both surprising and obvious. We expect such moments of brilliance to come from seasoned professionals, but they rarely do. Once you're in the system, that kind of wild creativity seems to get ground out until it's as fine as fairy dust.

The last panel on the last day of the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco was the Portal Post Mortem, where Kim Swift (one of the original designers) and Erik Wolpaw (the guy who wrote all of that hilarious dialog for GLaDOS) would tell us, the audience, just how Portal became Portal.

The room was as full as a room can be without people actually being stacked on top of each other. I'm glad I don't know the mathematical equations necessary to calculate how rapidly a crowd that size was using up all the available oxygen, because I might have fled in sheer terror otherwise. Everyone, everyone wanted to hear what Kim and Erik had to say. Or at least they thought they did.

After Erik and Kim gave a fascinating glimpse into the creation process (here's a hint: playtest the crap out of everything, as soon as you possibly can), they answered a seemingly never-ending stream of questions from the audience. If you've been following the Portal saga at all, you know that people have been analyzing and reanalyzing it, desperately trying to find deeper meaning in its 19 levels. They make much of the fact that both Chell and GLaDOS are female characters (clearly, it's a lesbian game!) and even find significance in the colors of the portals themselves.

It was almost heartbreaking to see them step up to the mic, certain that they'd have their theories confirmed, only to have either Swift or Wolpaw tell them, in so many words, to get a life.

"I couldn't help but notice that the portals in Narbacular Drop (Portal in its original form) were red and that they changed to orange in the final version, and I was wondering about the significance of that?"

"We tried a lot of colors and liked orange best."

"Settle a bet for me. Is Chell a cyborg?" That's a big one, the Chell is a cyborg theory. To be fair, she does have those weird things on her legs, so this one isn't totally out of left field. But as it turns out...

"No, she's not. We just put those weird things on her legs."

And so it went. Theory after theory being shot down by cold, hard, practicality. And the biggest ones of all, the ones about GLaDOS being female so that she's some kind of mother figure, or that everyone in the game is a girl because the game is some kind of pro-lesbian statement? Guess again.

GLaDOS is female because the Portal team knew that whoever they cast would be taking some very specific direction ("No, say it exactly like this") and knew an actress they thought would be amenable to that. And Chell is female because Valve's Gabe Newell suggested it.

"We had a guy originally, and then Gabe walked by one day and said, 'Why don't you make it a girl?' and we said, *shrug* 'Ok.'"

That's it. No subtext. No deeper meaning. Just a great game made by an insanely talented group of people. Apologies to those in the gaming community who feel that games must Mean Something in order for them to have value, but sometimes a girl is just a girl.

Ray Kurzweil says:

In The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology:

The human ability to understand and respond appropriately to emotion (so-called emotional intelligence) is one of the forms of human intelligence that will be understood and mastered by future machine intelligence. Some of our emotional responses are tuned to optimize our intelligence in the context of our limited and frail biological bodies. Future machine intelligence will also have "bodies" (for example, virtual bodies in virtual reality, or projections in real reality using foglets) in order to interact with the world, but these nanoengineered bodies will be far more capable and durable than biological human bodies. Thus, some of the emotional responses of future machine intelligence will be redesigned to reflect their vastly enhanced physical capabilities. (ISBN 0-670-03384-7, pp. 28-29)

This is important to videogames somehow. He explains that foglets are nanomachines that can alter audio and visual signal at a molecular level. This will be the kind of technology that lets you have Street Fighter IN YOUR OWN EYES AND BRAIN.

Ray Kurzweil has some really amazing ideas. He is a future predicter, an inventor (made one of the most successful lines of synthesizers and music equipment), and a writer, among other things.

I have read a bit of this book and it has been a great time. He writes in a way that explains some really far out concepts (like the implications of nanotechnology, the merging of human intelligence with machine, basically how everything will be solved with technology). He is very optimistic; I kind of see what he talks about as The Matrix, but all the good things about it. I suppose his future is very charming and bright with fresh fruits and clean water everywhere and also clean air and no health problems, also, immortality.

I'm sure one could debate his ideas and find evidence as to why the future will be crap and all that, but since the future is still up in the air, I'd like to be optimistic about it.

Thank you, Ray Kurzweil, you are truly a hero of video games.

I just poked Ashley Williams

So it seems that Paul Zander takes issue with my aggressive and perhaps mean gameplay styles. That's probably because in real life I am very nice and he is actually really mean. So when I play video games I like to be rude and bad, whereas Zander tends to be nice as some sort of penance for the evil he does day to day.

I just poked Ashley Williams in Mass Effect. Got my Paramour achievement. I take it as a personal triumph that I didn't get stuck making romance to an alien (like Zander). I called Mr. Zander after my tryst to brag, since he had a big crush on Miss Williams. I saw her butt.

We were going to go at it again, but Joker buzzed in on the loudspeaker to announce we were about to drop in on Saren. LITERALLY. Nothing like a bit of sensual relations before saving the galaxy.

I just took a Mass Effect in my pants

I had never played the highly touted Knights of the Old Republic but I had heard good things about it and it's developer Bioware. I usually don't really care too much about who makes a game but when I saw G4 had given it the best game ever title (really?? Best game ever??) I thought I would try their new RPG style game Mass Effect.

As most role-playing games you start off customizing your avatar. I always try to make it look like me but elephantitis isn't an option. My character "Commander Shepard" unfortunately came out looking a little like a mix between Joaquin Phoenix and Vladimir Putin.

The scar on my guy did make me look like a badass though. Afterwards you are forced to choose a class. Soldier, techie or biotics (those are people with magiks like abilities. Think Gandalf or Diana Troy). A few autobiographical questions about what kind of person you are and then you 're off to kick it hardcore in the galaxy!

Now it get's good. The story is vast, interesting and has a surprising amount of depth to it. There are tons of dialogue trees but the voice-over really makes it feel like a conversation. I spent hours just talking to people learning about the universe. Actually come to think of it, I probably spent more time than I would like to admit learning about a fake universe but whatever that's why I'm a hardcore gamer. But what's really cool is that the the dialogue is important in deciding what kind of character you are. A good guy, paragon, or a ruthless leader, renegade. This is probably my favorite part of the game. You actually have many tough choices to make giving you the feeling that you really are creating a unique game experience. It's like a choose your own adventure game. Weeeeee!!

The truth is I'm kind of a softy at heart and did everything ethically. That's just me though. Fellow blogger Brendan, as usual, killed, cheated and screwed his way through the entire storyline. (he also harvested all the those babies in Bioshock…..freakin psychopath) I reveled in doing the right thing but I was pissed when I didn't get bang the human chick because she thought I was too much of a pussy.

The good guys never get the girl. But they do get tons of alien poon! SPOILER ALERT! Okay alerts over.

Awesome game overall. A few glitches and it can get a little repetitive but it has enough great elements to keep you going. The end of the game doesn't dissapoint.

Also, very exciting downloadable content is coming in a month or so. New chapters and adventures. The game that keeps on giving.... for a price of course.

I am NOT a whore!

Last night I had a pleasurable experience.

While playing Half Life 2: Episode 2, I said "Achievement points, you are a weiner."

I startled myself when I said it. It surprised me. It was as if it bubbled up from a dark place in my soul that I did not know about. Instead of reloading, for the fifteenth time, a previous save point so I could destroy the f'ing helicopter without missing a single gravity gun mine toss, I uttered the aforementioned heresy and continued to play, knowing that I was sure to miss out on 15 achievement points.

I continued to flaunt good sense when I did not take the time to kill a hunter with its own flechettes. It felt good. I was so aroused by my rebelliousness that I drank a beer.

I think I was tired of dragging out these games for what are, in the end, pretty much useless trinkets. I still love my achievement points. But I'm going to go through the game and play as I please, at least at first, before I start whoring myself out to the sacred 1000 points.

I've Been Lax (Super-Post)

Tuesday night I fired up my Xbox for the first time in over a month. I've four unplayed titles sitting on my shelf (Mass Effect, Dead Rising, Lost Planet, and Project Sylpheed) and five unfinished titles (Gears of War, Ultimate Alliance, Ninety-Nine Nights (ugh, but I'll still finish the damn thing), The Orange Box, and FlatOut), so it's pretty clear I'm not at a loss for games to play. So what the hell happened; why have I been so lax in my elite video-gaming responsibilities as Xbox player and hardcore, down-and-dirty, laser blade (pyew pyew) yellow journalist? I blame it all on the goddamn PC and those equally god-damned German developers.

Let me tell you a story concerning my gaming misadventures of the last month or so. Take it as a cautionary tale please, of the horrors games can wreak on one's mind, nay; his very existence!



Ok, it might not be all that bad, but it gave me an opportunity to ape some Lovecraft (poorly at that) and stick in a Cthulu picture. Look at that green tentacled bastard. Can you believe thay actually made a plushie of this damn thing? The Elder God is supposed to be the the physical unreality of the apex of human horror; a creature so unspeakably terrifying that humans cannot even perceive his true form lest they go absolutely mad. Now you can cuddle with the bastard?



Pffh.

It's almost as bad as the Companion Cube madness that ran through our hardcore gaming journalistic societies this past fall. I hate you Companion Cube. I reloaded your firey death many a time.

Enough digression, digression is what got me in this state of lax-ness (new word!) anyway. My story begins almost a year ago. I periodically review games for another website (free loot, woohoo!) and during this time Oblivion was still the big thing on the PC and a bunch of clones were starting to pop up (Two Worlds, I'm looking your way). One of these was a game called Gothic 3, third (obviously) in a popular series of German role-playing games. Whatever, I cared not about its origins just that it was sold to me as being as open-ended as Oblivion, but with the interactivity of a game like Fable. My black, Companion-Cube-hating heart did a-flutter at this description. Too good to be true? Nah.

Of course, this is a PC game and they never work right out of the box. This is just how it is. You wait for the damn patch; rules of the game. I knew this. When I tell you Gothic 3, even after two official patches, never worked, I do not lie. I exceeded the minimum specs for this game in all but one category, in which I met them, so I figure in low or medium settings I should be fine; as long as the game has an acceptable framerate, texture quality is secondary. Like the transmission to an old Chevette this thing went stutter-stutter-clunk more times than I can count.



Massive memory leak issues plagued this game and if I hit 5 frames per second in all my fifteen minutes of playing, well, Jesus smiled fondly upon me then. Of course, ever since I came out of the closet as a zealous Satanist, Jesus' smiles have been harder and harder to come by. Fifteen minutes of playing and a week spent tweaking every file or setting I could find in the games code or .ini file and scouring the internet for fixes, and the game just would not work. I was at a loss. My dream game. I could not play my dream game. Of course I blamed Jesus, but now I blame Germany because they made it.

Off and on through last spring and summer I'd try some new official patches and some new tweaks, but nothing worked. I could not play this game. I'd forget about it for whole months and then come back for a week or so, desparately trying to eke some fun out of what is surely my dream game. It was described using two games I liked, how can it be anything else but my favortest!

Three weeks ago: a breakthrough! I had recently upgraded my memory and decided on a whim to re-install Gothic 3 and check for updates. Bad news: The German developer has stopped support of the game, no more patches. The Good news: a community of Gothic players had relased fan-made patches that supposedly fixed the dreaded memory-leak issues. Yay! Satan smiled upon me today indeed!


Hands caked in the sweat and the blood of the unbaptized i hurredly installed the game that had been the bane of my existence, taunting me from afar. I installed the patches and started a new game.

It worked.

Glorious day it worked! I can run through grassy meadows, skirted along gorgeous coastlines, and wandered a virtual world that may even put Oblivion's to shame. On medium settings Icould play at a healthy 40-50 frames per second. Oh how I wept.

Of course, a few days into play I started to realize something. It couldn't be, yet, I couldn't shake the feeling. Gothic 3 is just a sucky game. Combat is clunky and awkward and the game is flat-out boring: littered with fetch quests and redundancy. It sucks. Not a fun game. Appeals to losers. I am the loser here.

It's still installed on my machine, but I'm not playing it. It's really even a waste of time to play. So I took a break from video games. I needed to find myself. Find my center again. This past Tuesday I came back: fired up the Xbox, played some Gears of War. A fun game that works; games can be fun.

I still <3 video games.

Fuck you Gothic 3.

I’ve been well behaved

After the onslaught of pre-Xmas releases, I haven’t found the need, besides a few Xbox Live Arcade purchases (made with a handy 5000 points card present… thanks ma!), to buy any brand-new games. The only thing on the radar for me is Super Smash Bros. Brawl. And oh man am I psyched for that.

I’ve been finishing games, and currently am nearly complete the Half Life saga on The Orange Box. I’m going to write a “final thoughts” post when I’m totally done, but it really has been a journey. Half Life kinda gets in your brain, in weird ways. When I see oil drums through the window of the train scattered about Philadelphia junkyards, I immediately think “pick up with gravity gun; throw.”

Also have been having a blast with Team Fortress 2. When you get into a solid ranked match, when people aren’t coming and going like in player matches, the fun is VERY FUN. Since the matches can be long, you get to know your teammates a little bit, and from my experience the people who play TF2 are more of the nerdly bookish type (aka pleasant chaps) than the Halo 3 “omg ur a loser gay n*gg*r” norm.

Still continuing my quest for 120 stars in Mario. Super Mario Galaxy is like plugging an instant fun IV into your body. Can’t go wrong.

After beating the first two bosses in No More Heroes, I put it aside to concentrate on old games, but the urge to hack and cut and laugh is strong.

And then there is Mass Effect. Can’t wait to see what happens, and also, shoot things with magic and guns. There’s only so much time in the day for video games.

So, expect the “Half Life Saga: Complete” post within a few days. More soon.

OMG that's Nathan Drake: He's so hot right now!

It’s been love hate relationship between most people and their PS3s this year. Only a few exclusive games, difficulty in game design, unimpressive DLC. Let’s face it. The best part about having a PS3 is telling your friends you have a huge ugly Blue-Ray player. Not that I own any Blue-Ray DVDs. So after such disappointments, was I suppose to start wetting my pants when people started lauding Drakes Fortune as one of PS3’s saving graces? Yeah just like Liar, right?

Well, shit on Mount Rushmore and call me Jefferson because this game does kicks ass. It has been one of the most fun times I’ve had playing games all year. I laughed, I almost cried, I was close to becoming seriously emotionally attached to the characters.

The story revolves around Nathan Drake. A dashingly handsome relative of the famous pirate and nobleman, Sir Francis Drake. In this Indiana Jonesesque story, you are in search of the famous El Dorado. It sounds cheesy especially when you add in the pretty reporter, Elena, and Sullie, your sneaky friend and mentor. But the incredible voice acting and real-motion capturing make for hours of great game play. And I do mean only a few hours. The game is pretty short but that could have been because I took only a few breaks to replenish the saline solution in my dry eyes from staring at the TV too long.

I do like that Nathan is not exactly your studly manly man that you normally see in games. The dialogue between the three characters is spot on and usually really funny. I did feel like they did a good job of developing the characters throughout the game and it’s probably one of the first games that actually plays like a movie with an interesting and funny storyline. It’s not perfect. The fighting can get a bit repetitive and the jumping takes a bit to get use but I love the way the duck and cover shooting and melee attacks work seamlessly together.

It's hard to talk about this game and not mention that it is visually stunning. The water looks very real and the lush backdrops really show off the PS3's power.

Hopefully this will fill the void that Tomb Raider’s sinking franchise left. I would also suggest that you watch the bonus motion capture scenes also. It was funny to see that the guy who plays Nathan is an older slightly chubby dude. He looked more the like real Drake.

I play horrible games

I play horrible games I’ve been totally bummed recently with my gaming experience. I received two games recently through Gamefly and I can definitively say the both suck ass. Both a new and older game. Equally sucking.

Kane and Lynch, has had a ton controversy around it due to the firing of the reviewer who ripped the game on Gamespot. I decided that I would judge it for myself.

At first glance it looked like the kind of game that I would like to play. Violence, guns, bad language and things generally in bad taste.

I knew in the first 15 minutes of playing this game hat it deserved whatever harsh criticism that lead to Gerstmanngate. I read the review that got the guy fired and I agree with most of it. It’s basically unplayable at some parts. Literally, at one point I got stuck in a wall and the game just glitched out on me. The gameplay is clunky, the movements and aiming are awkward. It reminded me of a bad version of a game I really do like, “The Getaway.” When companies are making millions of dollars on games, this type of shotty mess is unacceptable. It seems fair to me that if you make a horrible game, it will get terrible reviews, and people won't buy the crap, they lose thousands of dollars. Economics 101

Devil May Cry 4

Anything that is on it’s 4th sequel immediately has me a little skeptical. And yes, I’m talking to you Dynasty Warriors 17. But I was genuinely interested to see how it would look and play on a next gen system. I remember kind of liking Devil May Cry 2 so why not. I started getting annoyed after half an hour when there had been 27 minutes of cut scenes and only 3 minutes of actual game-play. The cut-scenes were these elaborate cool fighting scenes of godlike proportions but then followed by an actual game-play that was tailor-made for a monkey who is good at mashing his little monkey fingers on a controller.

At certain points in the game, in a very unoriginal fashion, you have to clear every enemy on the screen in order to break a magic seal. But before and after every clearance it skips to a scene of the Seal being created or destroyed. Why??!! I get it, I’ve just done it 300 times. Oh another fucking cut-scene, great. The game kills any sort of flow. Christ, another cut-scene. The monkies are begining to throw feces at the TV screens.

Also, the story loses something when your main character is just ridiculously bad ass. I mean this dude is like the illegitimate love child of Chuck Norris and Thor. During the CGI parts he is so totally bad-ass that it makes you feel stupid when finally actual game-play commences and he is as easy to kill as a baby seal. (too soon?)

I also don't necesarily agree with one popular website review which said "Stylish action, terrific boss fights, and beautiful, melodramatic cutscenes will inspire you to push forward, and they serve as an appropriate reward for a well-played sequence of demon slaying."
Does it even matter since they have already shown a commitment to sell games rather than actually review them?

Well, next post I promise to tell you about a game that I really did like!

Yeah, but no, these two games sucked. I'm sure there will be people who like DMC 4 but I know i didn't.

Nintendogs can kiss my ass

My stepdog Roger passed away just before Christmas. I'd only known him for about a year, but he was the sort of dog you can't help but adore and I loved him very, very much. He was an old pooch, about 17 or so, and had been ill for quite a while, so while his passing was extremely sad, it wasn't entirely unexpected.

We grieved, we mourned, we said that someday, far in the future, we would get another dog. Apparently Superbowl Sunday is far in the future, because that's when we decided to bring home Alice the wonder dog.

Alice is a six month old lab/border collie mix that we adopted from the SPCA. She was horribly abused by her previous owner, but she's sweet, smart, and wants nothing more than to lick every square centimeter of your face. Impossible not to love her.

I've had many dogs over the course of my life, but I've never actually had a puppy before. That's ok, I thought, I've played Nintendogs! Clearly I have the requisite skill set necessary for tending to a pup!

Um, no.

She does not want to wear a rainbow afro wig. She does not want a bath. She does not go to sleep when I put on the special record. I also don't remember the Nintendogs nibbling on my fingers, chewing up my magazines (no, girl! Not this month's issue of Geek!), or being afraid of going bye bye in the car. In short, Nintendogs has left me ill prepared to care for this dog. I should sue.