Sea Change?

I've been back from Iceland for a little while now, but I've also been exceedingly busy and barely gaming since then. I have managed, however, to play through all of the cool new demos on XBOX Live. Strangehold takes the Max Payne formula, transplants it into a Hong Kong action movie, and really brings it to the next level; I'm definitely looking forward to the final product. Skate is a more realistic take on professional skateboarding while still maintaining a great level of casual fun. Eternal Sonata is something I'm really looking forward to playing, as the graphics are gorgeous and the dynamics of the battle system are really refreshing after the last few RPGs I've been through. Beautiful Katamari didn't seem like anything particularly new, but then it was a pretty short demo. BioShock was beautiful, fantastically atmospheric, and just a whole lot of fun. There's no denying that it is essentially another System Shock game, but really, that's not a bad thing after so many years :) In the Arcade, neither Space Giraffe nor Street Trace: NYC really did anything for me; they're not bad, but I doubt I'll ever buy them... They are pretty though.

While I was out of the country, the vast majority of my time gaming was spent with Lumines and Final Fantasy on my PSP. Lumines is Lumines; if you haven't played it yet, you should; if it doesn't grab you at first, stick with it... It will. The Final Fantasy remake is really solid, and I was having a whole lot of fun with it... Until I ventured into the Earth Gift Shrine, an optional dungeon that was added to the DS and PSP remakes. Now, perhaps I just suck at RPGs, or perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but I'm in the final room, all of my characters are level 26 and well-equipped, and I can't defeat any of the enemies or find any exits aside from the ones behind the aforementioned enemies whom I cannot seem to defeat. FAQs haven't been much help, but then I'm trying to avoid them (I like finishing games on my own). The game hasn't been touched since returning to Canada.

Moving on, I think I may be installing Windows Vista on my main system in the next few days. With Microsoft's recent release of the Vista compatibility and performance updates (which together cover most of the updates announced for early-2008's SP1), M-Audio's release of a FireWire series driver for 32-bit versions of Vista, and the ability to disable driver signature checking for RivaTuner (was always an option, even when I was bitching about software overclocking in Vista in the past), things are starting to come together nicely... I'll be back with more on this soon.

*grumble*

Stranglehold and BioShock demos are out... And I'm in Iceland.

Hepping Boursdey!

I had a birthday the other day. Got Dead Rising for XBOX 360, Mortal Kombat Armageddon for XBOX, 300 on HD DVD, and a totally unexpected Canon PowerShot SD700 IS Digital ELPH with a 2GB SD card :)

Oh yeah!

I forgot to mention that I downloaded the Transformers demo the other day... And wow! What a pile! :) The graphics are alright (well, Bumblebee looks good, and the fancy lighting effects are decent; the enemies and environments, not so much), the controls when in robot form are passable, and uh... That's about it. The driving controls are loose and floaty to the point of hitting Alt+F4 (I believe that's Apple+Q for all you Mac users), the locked camera while driving is too low and supremely annoying, combat is terribly repetitive, the generic enemies look like giant cameras, and, worst of all, when checking the options menu to see how to transform, the command was linked to a function called "convert". CONVERT!? DON'T YOU MEAN, "TRANSFORM"!? SERIOUSLY, THE GAME IS CALLED TRANSFORMERS! These people couldn't've been that stupid... All they had to do to effectively realize a good game that fit their apparent design was rip-off Grand Theft Auto and Crackdown, and toss-in some giant transforming robots. I'm guessing development time constraints were the culprit here... Sad.

Anyway, on to happier things, has anyone been watching the video game retrospectives over on GameTrailers.com? They did one for Zelda last year, and are in the midst of Final Fantasy and Metroid retrospectives at the moment. It's a great bit of nostalgia if you're familiar with the series, and potentially an interesting history lesson if you're not. Episodes are 10~15 minutes each, and new ones are out each week. For the first time, I'm starting to see Web-based 'TV' as a viable entertainment option :) Five minute home movies with random release schedules just weren't doing it for me...

ENOS Lives, URNOTE... The "E" should be red :)

I finally got to spend some quality time with a PS3... Hooked-up to a 70" 1080p Sony rear-projection HDTV (via HDMI) and a 6.1 digital audio receiver :) The guy who owned the setup didn't have any full games, but he did have a bunch of demos (and I downloaded a few more while I was there). I played Blast Factor (kinda a lot like Geometry Wars; not necessarily a bad thing), Full Auto 2 (prettier and more full-featured than it's XBOX 360 predecessor), Gran Tourismo HD Concept (same old; very pretty), Heavenly Sword (God Of War, but less good!), MotorStorm (it opened with one of my favourite Nirvana songs, Breed :) ), Ninja Gaiden Sigma (like the XBOX game, but with more stuff and better lighting), Resistance (*yawn*), Ridge Racer 7 (it's Ridge Racer), and Virtua Tennis 3 (same as the 360 demo, but with more options and opponents). The menu system was the same as the PSP's, and everything was pretty solid and intuitive. The 60GB systems are available for $549 CDN at the moment, with add-on deals like MotorStorm for $20 or Enchanted Arms for $0.01, but I'm still in no rush to blow that kind of money... I wouldn't knock anyone for owning one though; Sony's got a solid platform with a lot of potential there; I could stand to have the install and load times a bit shorter though.

Moving on, I've been sick for the past week, and so I started a new career in Top Spin 2. This is the first time I've played it since it crashed during my first career tournament and saved my game with a loss recorded. Ergh. Well, I'm having a lot more fun this time, and the load times seem to be way more bearable (was there a software update?), and no more crashes. So far it's a lot of fun, if a touch easy, but still challenging enough to keep me interested. I just hope it's not like Virtua Tennis 3 (on PSP, anyway) where the opponents suddenly get frustratingly hard as you get to the upper rankings.

On an entirely unrelated note, when I last worked as a regular service technician, I was told about a data recovery company to refer certain desperate clients to. I'd heard stories of $400/hr bills, but never got any solid numbers back myself. Well, that corrupt filesystem I mentioned last time wasn't satisfied with the handful of digital camera images I'd managed to recover, so I sent him their way. He came back to me saying they had "good" news; that they could recover most of his stuff, and that it would be cheap! Only $850! :)