It’s with a sad heart that I hang up my hat here tonight at Eat My Bomb. Unfortunately, I’ve been a casualty in the war between competing obligations and the battle to fit everything that needs doing in a brief twenty-four hour time period every day. While Eat My Bomb continues to grow and become a top-notch place to read the skinny on video gaming, I’ve been pulled slowly away from gaming and writing about gaming. Things like work, preparing for graduate school, and other personal obligations have kept me from gaming in earnest and posting content here regularly for those who actually give a hoot about bargain-bin gaming. I don’t think it’s fair to the editors or the readers if I stick around like piece of dead weight.

In addition to hanging up my hat as a writer for Eat My Bomb, I’m also retiring from the awesome Eat My Bomb guild on the Eldre’thalas World of Warcraft server. While I’ll no longer be around to quest with the likes of Feodra, Hariseedz, and Brixtone, I’d be very appreciative if my Night Elf druid didn’t die an anonymous death because of my lack of time and energy to keep going. Adenadar is presently a level 46 druid, with maxed-out herbalism and he is less than fifty points away from reaching full mastery of alchemy and first aid. He comes equipped with a helluva clue stick for knocking sense into murlocs, trolls, and the occasional giant. If anyone is interested in taking over this character and continuing in the adventures of the Eat My Bomb guild, post a comment below or send a note to adenadar@aetherial.net.

So, while my contributions to EMB are at an end, I’ll wrap this up by saying that I’m still eagerly awaiting some reviews down the road. In no particular order, I’m interested in seeing the posts about “The Call of Cthulhu”, the EMB guild hitting level 60, and finding out which next generation consoles are THE shit and which ones are just shit.

So, goodbye all, and may you never forget the original Konami Contra code.

Ladies and gentlemen. Friends and countrymen. Freespace 2 has eaten the bomb.

I spent last night in sci-fi decompression mode. Work has been hell as of late and we finally shipped software yesterday. In a mood of celebration and rejuvenation, I spent the evening watching Trek and Galactica, and finishing the space sim that I started two weeks ago.

While the ending was a bit lacking and incomplete (more on this later), I come away from Freespace 2 a happy camper. Freespace’s sequel was smart enough to stay faithful to the tried and true - a great space-sim experience. After some tweaking, the controls were smooth and unfrustrating. The graphical update to Freespace to allow playing at a 1024×768 resolution looked beautiful on my monitor. I enjoyed the updated content and the audio in the game was better than most. And the prospect of continuing to play the game using community-generated content is pretty exciting.

On a scale of ten, this game gets eight and a half stars. In terms of a gaming experience, it hit all the buttons. As a storytelling experience, it missed a few things.
(Read on …)

Given the ordeal surrounding the acquisition of Freespace 2, I’m going to try and get as much mileage out of it as possible for review fodder. Instead of doing the one-shot “I fed the bomb to Freespace 2″ review, over the next few weeks, I’ll be publishing a series of running reviews as I play through the game. That said…

Freespace 2, Day One

Like the previous Freespace game, this one starts out with a long cut-scene explaining the setting and situation of the game. This game happens thirty-two years after the original, which provided the game designers an opportunity to design updated spacecraft and weapons. In this scene, we find out that Earth has been isolated and lost, due to the collapse of the hyperspace jumpnodes at the end of the last game. The humans and Vasudans have formed a joint government, and their biggest threat is a xenophobic sect of humans slightly reminiscent of the American Neo-Confederates.

After the storyline is laid out, the game begins by setting your new pilot up in a set of training missions to teach you the ropes of weapons systems, energy management, wing commanding, and so on. After a few basic firing and maneuverability training missions, the game throws your pilot into the thick of things battling the anti-gov’t rebels.

Preflight Command Briefing

In terms of gameplay, this has been the first time I’ve broken out the joystick since finishing the last Freespace. Immediately, I was struck by how clumsy I am with the joystick and how difficult it is to track and shoot down targets. While the stages are still easy enough at this point to compensate for my joystick clubfoot, some trial and error lead me to disable the banking controls that are tied to rotating the joystick. Since I had a tendency to twist clockwise while maneuvering, this helped out immensely. Still, I need to retrain myself as it’s taking me much too long to track and destroy enemy fighters.

“Say ‘Hello’ to my little friend.”

After chasing the space Neo-Confederates a bit, the game switches gears as your fleet discovers a Shivan (the foes from the last game) jumpnode. Your pilot is transfered from a quick space-superiority fighter to a slower fighter-bomber. Before setting out out on the bombing runs, the game provides a few more training missions to educate your pilot on the finer points of shield direction and missile evasion. After these missions, your pilot is thrown into nebula-based combat with the Shivans. While your original responsibility is to scout and destroy enemy fighters, by the end of the sequence, you’re engaged in a bombing run targeting out a Shivan capital ship while an Allied capital ship also pounds the behemoth and provides cover. After dispatching the Shivans, your Allied group declares victory having captured this section of space.

Things won’t be quiet for long…

Stay tuned.

As regular readers of my posts may know, I’m one cheap-ass gamer. I won’t buy a console until it hits the $150 mark and I wait until games fall to $20 before I can purchase them and not feel guilty about it. While I have both a PlayStation 2 and a Gamecube, most of my non-WoW gaming this summer has revolved around playing PlayStation (One) RPG titles.

On the PC, things are pretty much the same. I refused to purchase Starcraft for several years after it came out, only to snatch it up in 2004. When I’m skimming the games at CompUSA, I generally gloss over anything that has come out in the last eighteen months and head directly toward the $5.00 game displays that are placed near the cash registers to spur impulse purchasing. On the PC, this approach has served me well - I don’t spend a lot of cash on games and since they’re so old, I can run them at full “hi-quality” settings, regardless of the state of my cheap-ass PC.

Thinking back, the best purchase that I made of this type had to be Descent Freespace. I picked up the original game and add-on missions at a Target for five bucks. I got home, installed it, ran through the training missions, and it completely destroyed any impressions I had of what a good space sim was. Descent Freespace was to games like X-Wing and TIE Fighter what Half-Life was to Doom. In spite of its age, Freespace still retains one of the top spots among my favorite PC games.

“Yes, Virginia. There is space-based capital ship combat.”

So, this summer, when drafting my Summer Games 2005 list, it only made sense to conquer the sequel. Unfortunately, simply acquiring Descent Freespace 2 was a Herculean task by itself and made me go against some of my more *ahem* frugal principles.
(Read on …)

In my Summer Games entry, one of the commenters made the observation that Blizzard’s World of Warcraft was the anti-game because it sucked up the player’s time to such an extent that other games were left neglected. While I was initially skeptical, I’m now convinced that poster was onto something as many of my Summer Games have been neglected because of my online questing.

One of the things that makes the game so adictive is the number of things to discover. There are a ton of new lands, monsters, and items. As I found out a few nights ago, there are also character actions. By typing a frontslash followed by a verb, oftentimes your character will execute the action. /follow is useful when trekking with teammates, while /laugh and /bow add flavor to regular text-based chatting.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered /dance:

Anyone up for a Thriller remake?

About a month ago, my cell phone contract finally ran out and I was in the market for a new phone. I was disappointed at Cingular’s offerings at the time and I didn’t have any particular inclination to stick my balls in their vice for another year so that I could pick up a marginally-better better phone for a couple hundred bucks and and the privilege of dicking around with rebates.

I don’t know where the idea came from, but I decided to try something different. Since the N-Gage flopped so badly in the United States, I decided to see if I could find one and use that as my phone. My rationale was simple:

1. The N-Gage supported all the phone features I wanted - Bluetooth, Mac sync’ing, a calendar, and an address book.

2. Given that retailers were treating them like festering carcasses taking up valuable shelf space, they would be pretty cheap and I could get it without a new contract or any of that rebate circus.

You’ll note above that there is nothing up there about getting it to play games. I needed a phone, and I was reasonable convinced that the N-Gage was a crappy games console. It ended up being a decent phone, but the critics were right - as a console, it bombed.

The first person shooter genre fails to work on a cell phone.

With morbid curiosity a few weeks after the initial purchase of the phone, I actually picked up two games - just to see, you know? I picked up “Ashen” and “X-Men Legends”. “Ashen” is a first person shooter that is a direct rip-off of the classic Doom. Only that you control using a directional pad and you have a numeric pad to work with. And no sound, unless you use Nokia’s proprietary earbuds. I tried playing the game after purchasing it, but it was hopeless - the game is simply unplayable.

Haven’t I seen something like this before?

After that, I tried “X-Men Legends”. It’s billed as an RPG, but I can’t figure out what the hell it was supposed to be. In “Legends”, you run around with four X-Men saving the day and fighting bad guys. To me, it felt like an updated port of the disastrous NES X-Men game from the 1980’s. I might have spent fifteen minutes trying the game before giving up on it. The controls were atrocious, and I could care less why the X-Men were beating up random people on the street while trying to find Mystique and the Blob.

Oh yeah! It’s just like that crappy X-Men game I threw out as a kid.

Up to this point, it’s easy to make the educated guess that the N-Gage is a bust as far as gaming is concerned. However, even this is not the case. After getting frustrated that I couldn’t fit all my contacts, my calendar, and my Super Mario MIDI ring tones on the device’s built in memory, I splurged and picked up a gigabyte MMC card for my phone online. Yes, you read that right - my phone has a gig of storage. The MMC card fits in the same slot as the games and the N-Gage sees it as another hard drive. That was cool because I could poke around and play with all the Series 60 software written for the device.

During this phase of exploration and discovery, I found a free application called GoBoy. GoBoy is a GameBoy Color emulator. It runs on the phone and looks for Game Boy ROMs. (Kids - don’t steal games!) In the spirit of testing, I downloaded the software and a few ROMS. Before I knew it, I was playing Tetris and Super Mario Land. The games didn’t feature thousand of colors or faux three dimensional environment, but they make it up for it by actually being playable and fun. Given that I have about a thousand megabytes to spare, and Game Boy cartridges tend to be a megabyte or two in size, my crappy Nokia portable game player may have just become the ultimate classic Nintendo gaming rig.

Now you’re playing with power!

Since people are already finishing games, I’d better get my ass in gear and post my list of games to play before it becomes Fall Games 2005. So, without further ado:

1. Resident Evil (GameCube) - After umpteen million initial attempts to get used to tank controls, once I did, I had a great time playing “Resident Evil: 0″. The sound was great, the visuals were awesome, and so on. This game is my official warm-up for Stubbs.

2. Final Fantasy Chronicles (PlayStation) - We Final Fantasy fans are mindless sheep. Thrown in some new cut scenes, and we’ll play our way to the slaughterhouse. “Chronicles” is the PlayStation adaptation of the SNES classics “Final Fantasy: II” and “Chrono Trigger”. I beat FFII a few years ago, but I have yet to see the new scenes. “Chrono Trigger” will be brand new for me.

3. Star Wars: Battlefront (PlayStation 2) - I still dream of becoming a clone trooper. Bring on the droid army!

And filling in the rest of the time will be “World of Warcraft”. The world will learn to fear Adenadar, the Dark Elf Druid! (Once he gets off the newbie island.)

[Update: I didn’t want to do this, but Tim’s forced my hand. No. 4 on my list will be Interplay’s Freespace series for the PC: Descent Freespace, Silent Threat, & Freespace 2. Two or three more games (depending on how you count Silent Threat).]