Archive for April 15th, 2011

Patapon used to groove. Now it just sort of generically rocks out.

Thumbs down.

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The irony is that the death of gaming came immediately after one of the biggest gaming booms ever.

My wife’s pregnancy was, not to put too fine a point on it, hell on earth. We had just recovered from the shock and awe of finding out that we were having twins when she was hit with an unrelenting wave of nausea that lasted four months.

Four. Months.

Think about that for a second. Take your worst hangover, multiply it by 120, and then imagine choking down meals for the benefit of your unborn children even though the thought of food makes you violently ill. Whoever coined the phrase “morning sickness” should be shot. Or, at least, sued for false advertising.

No sooner had the nausea started to wane than the searing, roiling heartburn kicked in, making her next four months an absolute treat. Add in the other trials of pregnancy — joint pain, back pain, constant bathroom breaks, lugging the babies on board up to our third-floor apartment — and you can understand why all she wanted to do was sleep. Each evening, she would wait until I got home and stay up just long enough to ensure that she didn’t wake up bright-eyed and bushy tailed in the middle of the night. She would crawl off to bed around 7 p.m. and try to escape the horror her life had become in the arms of a restless, fitful slumber. On the weekends, she would try to stay unconscious for as long as possible, only rising when she could no longer stand feeling like an invalid.

All of which left me with a lot of alone time. So what’s a gamer to do?

After the jump, feast, famine, life, and death. Continue reading →

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It would have been easy to half-ass Dissidia. Slap some characters together, give them a couple of special moves, put in a lot of old music, and call it a day. Instead, Square Enix created a unique fighting system, crafted an immense (if ludicrous) story, and put real thought into the characters. Dissidia is a love letter to the fans who have been playing Final Fantasy games for almost twenty-five years now, and as such Square Enix has packed it to the brim with fanservice.

After the jump, more in-jokes than you can shake a moogle at Continue reading →

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The first Shift did a great job tracking your friends’ performance in different races. It compared your best time to the best time from your friends list. Using these times, it assigned “ownership” to an event, and then it tallied the number of events you owned in any group to assign ownership to groups of events. When you played Shift, it provided an immediate visual cue to how well you were doing compared to your friends playing the game.

But Shift 2 uses Electronic Arts’ Autolog, a Facebook-inspired bit of social bloat bolted onto the side of the game.

After the jump, I will try really hard to hate Autolog Continue reading →

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You spend a lot of time alone in Stalker: Call of Pripyat. It’s a lonely world, with wide expanses of abandoned land, ruined buildings slumping slowly into the swamps, and strangely mutated creatures running in packs through the tall and rustling grasses. I’ve been running back and forth for a while now, completing standard tasks for an assortment of indistinguishable hardasses. Go find his missing tool chest. Place these detectors inside of anomalies. Kill all the mutants in this lair. And I’ve been doing it mostly alone.

So when I get to team up with people, it’s pretty exciting. Hanging out with Grouse, as described in a previous entry, wasn’t that great. But a mission to rescue a stalker hostage from some bandits was surprisingly fun. I had the option to convince his buddies to help me attack the bandits, negotiate with the bandits, or deal with it my own way. I chose the latter option.

After the jump, me and my new buddy eff some bandits UP! Continue reading →

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