While trying to get a handle on one of the cars in Shift 2, I fired up the first Shift to see how it felt in that game. It felt pretty much the same, which was no surprise. I had confirmed that, yep, Shift 1 still felt great. The guys at Slightly Mad Studios get how to model the feel of a car — whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean — better than anyone else, so that was no surprise.
But what surprised me while playing Shift 1, which is a good-looking game, is how much better Shift 2 actually looks. My brain remembered Shift 1 looking awesome. But now, to my eyes, it doesn’t look as good as Shift 2. You can’t trust your brain and your eyes to get along. They’re often at odds.
After the jump, putting one right in the brain Continue reading →
Link trudges south across a beige flatland, his shield hoisted. Scuttling about him are Octoroks, red cephalopods with a cannon maw that identifies them as cross-catalogue cousins to Mario’s Birdo. The Hero of Hyrule draws his sword and prepares to join battle. Before he does, a greenish gray smog descends over the land. The heroic music chokes and stutters. My older brother and I moan. Our Hyrule is buggy, prone to armageddons of corrupted data. My brother yanks the cartridge from the NES and blows on the circuitboard like he’s playing harmonica, then slots it back in. I watch eagerly, waiting for Hyrule to return.
Since then, just one other game has enthralled me like that. The game was Link to the Past, because it was the first Zelda I was old enough to play instead of watch. Of the handful of other games to come close, most were Zelda sequels: Link’s Awakening in green monochrome on my half-brick Game Boy; Ocarina of Time, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess.
Twilight Princess came out five years ago. In the meantime I’ve gotten tired of gaming.
After the jump, I’m getting too old for this Continue reading →
It’s amazing how much you can learn about caring for twins in four months. You can go from a complete novice afraid of breaking his children and hopeless at diaper changes to a complete novice afraid of breaking his children who changes diapers like a champ.
If you’re also a gamer, you can pick up a few tips along the way to help you squeeze in a little more screen time and maximize your enjoyment. Consider these best practices for the baby set, whether you’ve got multiples or a singleton on the way.
After the jump, three tips for choosing the best games for your new circumstances. Continue reading →
I’ve had Dissidia 012 for about a month now, and I’ve put in probably fifty-odd hours on it. This in itself isn’t unusual; I tend to play every Final Fantasy game to unhealthy levels. My Final Fantasy X final save came in at 140 hours, at least 60 of which were spent playing the Blitzball minigame. I have yet to finish Final Fantasy XII in under 120 hours. I’ve beaten it four times.
But Dissidia 012 is a little different for me. It’s a fighting game. I don’t really like fighting games. Is it just the fanservice that’s kept me playing it?
After the jump, it’s past time for hustling middle schoolers Continue reading →
I’m on the Nurburgring sprint circuit, trying to set a record in an Aston Martin with a V12 engine. A V12 seems a bit excessive. It’s four more V’s than the last of the V8 Interceptors! But I’m having a hard time because of something that isn’t the driving.
After the jump, why I hate the fans in Shift 2 Continue reading →
Wait, really? Has it happened? Crap, I think it has: I’ve reached the point where I’m thinking more about other games than I am about this one. Damn. It’s not uncommon for me to become more interested in something else before I finish a particular game. My playing time is pretty limited these days, and once I feel like I’ve ‘gotten’ a game, it’s hard for me to keep playing it if there are newer, sexier, more interesting games available.
But I really want to finish this one. I want to put a bow on it and feel closure with my Stalker experience. But…when will closure come? It’s not like a book, where you can see you only have a hundred pages left. Games are pretty damn opaque, cues-wise. I’ve made it to Pripyat, the third (final?) area of the game, but have no way of knowing how much more game there is. My Steam game page says I’ve played for 16 hours (holy cow!), and that’s a bit less than the total time I’ve heard others report, so I should be wrapping it up soon. I think I’ll focus on critical path missions, and ignore side content.
After the jump, my issues are back Continue reading →
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 →
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 →
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 →
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 →
I have a favorite character in every Final Fantasy game. I think everyone who plays a Final Fantasy game has a favorite character. They stay in the party all the time, they get the best weapons and armor, and they get all the top abilities. Your least favorite character is lucky to even get a seat on the airship before you take off, let alone get in the active party. If you look carefully at that picture, you might be able to figure out which of those characters I like and which I hate.
After the jump, maybe he’s a lion. Continue reading →
Finland’s involvement in World War II includes one of the great David vs. Goliath stories of all time. Invaded in November 1930 by Stalin’s Red Army, the woefully outnumbered and outgunned Finns humiliated the Russians, inflicting heavy casualties, and initially thwarting all their objectives. The lightly armed Finns conducted a clinic in mobile winter warfare, typified by the Battle of Suomussalmi where two entire Soviet divisions were annihilated while trapped on a forest road. Finnish casualties were fewer than 500. The war introduced the world to the untranslatable Finnish word sisu: a national strength of will that exemplified the performance of the country’s military. The Red Army eventually overcame this heroic resistance through a combination of improved leadership, coordination, and mostly just overwhelming numbers. But the Peace of Moscow signed in March 1940 fell far short of Stalin’s initial goal of the conquest of the entire country. The war captured the world’s imagination (although secured virtually no material assistance) and has been recounted in multiple books in many languages. Former PC Gamer columnist and wargaming guru William Trotter wrote an excellent account, Frozen Hell, almost twenty years ago, and a classic popular history, White Death by Allen Chew, was recently reprinted after initial publication way back in 1971.
After the jump, the darker side of the story Continue reading →
I am not a highly trained soldier. You can tell by watching me play a shooter, where I tend to shoot all around my target and hope it has the courtesy to step into the line of fire. But the first Modern Warfare made me feel like a highly trained soldier by lining up my gun for me. I squeeze the gamepad’s left trigger and my weapon points at a bad guy! Then it’s up to me to either finesse the aim for a headshot, or pull the right trigger to fire. From there I learn that awesome move where I pulse the left trigger to drop a cluster of bad guys one-by-one, with nary a wasted bullet. Years of virtual military training, sidestepped with an interface tweak.
After the jump, I’m not a professional race car diver either Continue reading →
I bought the game when a mod called Call of Pripyat Complete had just been released. It’s a huge mod with tons of new high-definition textures, expanded view distance, enchanced vegetation, and a ton of small changes to the AI, NPC behavior, UI, and soundscape. Apparently a similar mod has been released for the previous two games to great acclaim. Lots of people like this mod. And I want to, too!
After the jump, addicted to mods Continue reading →
I’ve played almost every Final Fantasy game released in the United States. I bought Final Fantasy VI a second time just so I could play it at work on my Game Boy Advance. There’s an army of Final Fantasy action figures on my desk. I have twenty-nine versions of the chocobo theme on my iPod. I have a plush tonberry doll. I named the plush tonberry doll.*
And even I think the Dissidia story is completely bonkers.
After the jump, Final Fantasy fanfiction Continue reading →
