*sigh* If only...

I'm 22 games into the season on "Difficult" and Mats Sundin leads the league in points, Jason Blake leads in goals, and Bryan McCabe leads in assists... Isn't that how it was supposed to be? :\

Not quite as complicated as converting celcius to fahrenheit...

Why does iTunes tell me how many minutes long my playlist is until it gets to be over an hour long, at which point it gives me a decimal value ("1.2 Hours")? I mean, if I'm making a playlist to burn to an 80 minute CD, I'd like to know that it will fit without converting decimal values to minutes (1.25 hours = 1 hour and 15 minutes)... I mean, honestly! Also, just because I'm a jerk, I played the same song on both iTunes and foobar2000 at the same time... foobar used ~14MB of RAM, and iTunes used ~54MB... Guh.

So I got a slightly more regular job the other day. I'm now an assistant sysadmin at a not for profit company downtown... Should be interesting :) Anyway, I treated myself to a SEGA CD and some games after getting the job... It's nice to finally see my Genesis-SEGA CD-32X combo in all its glory :) I picked up Jurassic Park (it's like Myst!) and Spider-Man vs. Kingpin (it's not like Myst!) for the SEGA CD, as well as Mischief Makers for N64 and Venture for ColecoVision... Turns out my ColecoVision doesn't quite work :\ Also got started on Stuntman: Ignition, and while it's pretty frustrating and reptitive, I'm have a lot of fun with it :) Oh, and finally, Rez HD hits XBOX Live Arcade tomorrow!!!

Progress!

Kane and Lynch is now out of the way... While I enjoyed the first half of the game more so than the final half, it was a pretty solid experience all around. I covered most of the qualities of the game in my previous post, and things seem to remain consistent throughout in those departments. I did find that tactical positioning, weapon choice, and ordering crew members around can really enrich the experience, but people who prefer to run 'n gun through the game will manage as well, albeit with a few more retries ;) What I really liked by the end was the engaging, morally charged story; no fairytale endings here. Really, with fantastic graphics, varied locales, quality acting, open ended gameplay, and a challenging story, I don't see why so many people are putting the game down. I had a great time with it... Maybe the console controls really are that painful, but the Windows version does not deserve the drubbing it got from a lot of critics.

Anyway, I'm now on to Sam and Max: Season 2, Episode 1 - Ice Station Santa and Episode 2 - Moai Better Blues. That leaves me with Call Of Duty 4, Lost Planet, and Overlord to finish on the PC front; it's nice to be making progress there... Of course, after those three, I still hope to play through Indigo Prophecy, Riven, Myst IV & V, Outcast, Jade Empire, Fallout 1 & 2, Planescape Torment, and all three Thief games... Yeah :)

Dead Men

Finished The Two Thrones. Great game. Played through BlackSite: Area 51 and, wow, I can't believe how low the scores have been for this title! It's got great graphics, solid acting, reasonably varied locales, a poignantly politically charged narrative, and classic Area 51 gameplay successfully transplanted into a modern-day FPS mould. I think that's where a lot of people missed the point; this is an Area 51 game (i.e. a dumb shooter a la Lethal Enforcers, Virtua Cop, Time Crisis, House Of The Dead, etc...) with an anti-war message. It is not Call of Duty 4. It was a bit short, but very pretty and a lot of fun to play through.

There was one thing that really bugged me about BlackSite though: You can't turn off the rumble function of your gamepad, so if you choose to play with a mouse and keyboard, your gamepad will rumble across the desk as you play... Yeah, wonderful :\ It gets worse though; I've started playing Kane and Lynch: Dead Men, another harshly received title, and it won't even let me use my mouse and keyboard while my gamepad is plugged in! Argh! For a game that is near unplayable with a gamepad (yet satisfyingly entertaining with a mouse and keyboard), you'd think they'd give you the option...

This brings me to my next point: I'm about a third of the way through Kane and Lynch, and I'm loving it. The graphics are really fantastic at times, the story is compelling, and the acting is great. The gameplay, while admittedly little more than a simple mechanic to involve players in the story, is still pretty satisfying... Play the nightclub level, and you'll see. No, Kane and Lynch is not a particularly challenging game, but it does entertain with its simplistic gameplay and high production values.

It looks as though many reviewers got a little wrapped up in the hype and pretense surrounding these two games and kinda missed the point. Both titles are mindless fun and tell stories that are a cut above what the majority of games are laden with. While I don't think either is worth the ~$60 they're going for (I don't like paying more than $50 for any game, personally), they are both definitely worth picking up of you ever find them on the cheap.

Speaking of on the cheap, I got my free copy of Undertow... Did you get yours? :)

Oh, and one last thing, if this is true, I'll just get Assassin's Creed for my XBOX 360, thanks...

More, please!

Bionic Commando: Rearmed. Yeah, I'm excited :) More remakes, please! I'm also kind of excited to learn that we'll be getting a free copy of Undertow on XBOX Live Arcade in response to the network outages over the holidays! While the demo didn't blow me a away, it's not at all a bad game, and free is always nice.

NHL08 seems to have gotten pretty easy as my "difficult" season has progressed, but it's still the best hockey game out there, and it is fun, so I guess I'll manage ;) Also, I've almost finished The Two Thrones, and, thankfully, that arduous puzzle-to-minigame-to-boss-battle sequence seems to have been the worst of things as the final chapter is progressing along quite nicely.

I also finished TimeShift. There's a lot of potential for an original experience in there, but the pacing really holds things back. The novelty of the time shifting gameplay wears off pretty quickly, and first half of the game starts to drag; combat becomes either frustrating or gimmicky, and travel from point to point feels tedious. While I had a lot more fun during the second half, I don't think it was because of a drastic shift in gameplay (though the missions did seem shorter, and the combat more frenetic) or because my guys started making some real headway in the war, but rather because the plot started to make a little more sense and I had a compelling reason to finish the game. The over-arcing story in TimeShift is revealed through painfully short and horribly fragmented (and thus mildly confusing, even without the time travel motif) cutscenes interspersed throughout the game. That was a bad idea. Give me a solid intro movie, reveal important plot points through cohesive and non-intrusive means throughout the first act, give me the big honkin' plot twist after the midway point in the form of the the whole movie that you hacked to pieces, and then build towards the climax and give me a rewarding cutscene for the finale. I say that the game has potential because all of these components are present in the final version of TimeShift, but are so mangled that it takes a concerted effort to understand just exactly what is going on, let alone the importance of the whole story. TimeShift could've been a more action-oriented Half-Life-esque title, but instead we got a dumb, gimmicky action game that narrowly fails at delivering any kind of redeeming narrative... Still, it's worth a rental.

Aw, and they were sooo close...

I loved the original Prince Of Persia, I never played the second one, was late playing the third one (thank God!), and loved The Sands Of Time... I felt really disappointed and frustrated by Warrior Within, not because of the focus on combat, the darker tone, or the nu-metal soundtrack, but because of a very few game design decisions that marred the entire experience for me. The boss battles were more like a bad 3D fighting game than the fantastic, fluid, acrobatic experience that The Sands Of Time had brought to the table, and there was no way to backtrack to discover certain secret areas that not only unlocked a powerful new weapon, but THE PROPER ENDING TO THE GAME as well! This isn't like a special bonus cinematic or an unlocked game mode, but rather how the story actually goes! Imagine me, maybe halfway through the game, realizing that I'm fucked because I missed one of several secret areas earlier and now must restart the entire game with a strategy guide by my side throughout if I want to see how it's supposed to end! Frustration doesn't even begin to describe what I was feeling as I plodded through the rest of what was an otherwise entertaining game.

Anyway, I finally picked-up The Two Thrones and was delighted to see that the designers had remedied many of the problems introduced by Warrior Within. Speed Kills essentially make combat optional, boss battles incorporate the surrounding environments and thus require more than just combat, and secret areas seem to yield only health bonuses, making them optional but still rewarding. I thought everything was actually pretty wonderful until last night, when I got to the end of the 4th chapter. I found myself faced with a terribly unintuitive puzzle that can be solved with trial and error, which lead directly to an extended chariot driving scene with no checkpoints, followed by an unskippable cutscene (why these exist in any game is beyond my understanding) that leads directly into a boss battle... Of course, I saw none of this coming, and was terribly low on resources by the time I got to the save point just before this boss battle, and now must revert to an earlier save (before the unintuitive puzzle; thank goodness I was making multiple saves) in order to conserve enough resources to have a fighting chance at this boss battle. They were so close! What a solid game otherwise! I really hope that sequence isn't indicative of the fifth and final chapter...

Otherwise, I've been trudging through TimeShift, playing through TrackMania United (uses a runtime version of Star-Force; no performance-inhibiting drivers installed!), and getting into a new season in NHL08 on the "difficult" difficulty level... As my record on the right side of this page shows, my suspicions of rubber-band gameplay need be further honed (the first three games of the season were mighty suspicious), but things do seem much more realistic at this level than at others.

Sweeet...

The other day, on the side of the road, covered in snow, I found an HP LaserJet 4MV with a toner cartridge, a JetDirect card, and 20MB of RAM installed... Works like a charm :) For what it's worth, the self test page count is 229061.

Otherwise, I've been playing some more NHL08 and TimeShift. I'm still not digging the strictness of the offside calls in NHL08, and I'm almost certain that there's some rubber-band gameplay employed; I've seen too many unlikely goals (like three in a row) at fantastically opportune moments. I know this stuff happens in real life too, but the regularity of it in a hard season in NHL08 really detracts from the experience for me; it's just not fun when the difficulty levels essentially consist of "blow out for your team", "closer games, but you still always win", and "the other team will beat you by one goal due to highly unlikely comebacks". Oh, and TimeShift has gotten really boring... I'm only about a third of the way through.