Is she wearing UGGs?!?

The demo is here to announce the impending return of the girl that kicked off a whole generation of games. That’s right, the big-breasted one is back in action and it’s certainly been an interesting ride for the past decade. For those who don’t know, a little history…the original Tomb Raider practically defined the 3D action-adventure genre. It may not have been much more than Indiana Jones as a hot chick, but it definitely clicked. Tomb Raider 2 came along and added new moves and vehicles to the up-and-coming franchise. Here’s where things take a turn for the worse, or at least for the stagnant. The series just got lazy. Despite title after title being churned out like Madden games, the graphical improvements were few and far between. The level design and storylines became more and more convoluted and nonsensical. Worst of all, the control scheme which had been functional (and perhaps even innovative) in 1996 was downright archaic in 2001. All movement was based on an underlying grid system similar to the original Prince of Persia’s overt one…want to walk forward slowly? Move one grid segment at a time. Running jump? You need to clear 3 grid squares in succession before jumping in order for it to qualify as a running jump. In the intervening years, we’ve seen all manner of games come along that used analog controls to move the character fluidly through the 3D world.

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Sony couldn’t have paid for better advertising

Damn that little black gadget, getting more and more tempting with each passing day. We all have too many games and not enough time. If you’re like me, you’ve begun planning out how to make the most of your schedule by figuring out which things (such as reading a book) can be done on your lunch break and which can only be done at home (such as busting out the Xbox). Of course, it’s all the more maddening when you have to stand in a line, sit in a waiting room, or otherwise kill time, thinking to yourself the whole while, “I could be playing Daxter right now.” After nearly a full year of sparse releases of mediocre games, the PSP seems to finally be coming into its own this month. The buzz on games like Daxter, Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror, and Pursuit Force are the highest the system has ever seen. Recent announcements include a non-Value Pack SKU selling for $199.99, an upcoming E-Distribution that will let you play PSOne games off the Memory Stick under emulation, and several other gizmos to expand the functionality such as a GPS module. Pile all of this onto the constantly hacked firmware allowing for SNES emulation and you’ve got yourself one hardcore machine in your pocket.

Sony, you vile temptress! Don’t you realize I have no time to squeeze in any more gaming?!?! Although, I do spend a lot of time at stop lights on the way into work. Hmmmmm……..

America…FUCK YEAH!

There’s nothing quite so disappointing as gearing up to play a new game that you’ve been looking forward to all day, only to have the experience fall short in the end. Ok, I can probably think of a few things more disappointing, but right now I don’t care. Wednesday night we found a new passion and it didn’t cost us a cent. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is the game that began as a single-player expansion to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and ended its development cycle by trashing the campaign and releasing instead as a standalone multiplayer game available for free download. The final product, a refinement of the objective-based team gameplay found in the original game, is a spectacularly fun achievement in coordination and FPS strategy. A well-organized team using voice chat would be able to execute attacks that would make the members of the greatest generation beam with pride.

Assuming, that is, that those attacks could be executed.

What we’ve found is that the network code seems to become extremely unstable when a voice client is utilizing some of the bandwidth. This is no lag slideshow either…we’re talking about full-on controls-wrested-from-the-user puppet show. Guns fire on their own, your character jumps around in any and all directions simultaneously (think rag doll in a dog’s mouth), and you become just as likely to suicide as you are to murder. Removing the voice chat can improve the situation, but makes good coordination that much more difficult. However, last night not even killing the voice on 3-on-3 matches entirely fixed the problem. While it might play silky smooth during one match, the very next match would turn into a crack fiend’s POV as the pings spiked for no discernible reason.

Not a one of us would call this game bad. It is one of the most fun and focused multiplayer shooters I’ve ever played. Unfortunately, whatever problem that is occurring is making it completely unplayable over the internet. Perhaps EMB Weekend ‘06 will see a LAN marathon of ET gameplay. Perhaps the upcoming Enemy Territory: Quake Wars will not only have the refined networking code to support what we want to throw at it but will also be scalable enough performance-wise to work on the spectrum of PC’s and Macs that we have. In the meantime, however, we all remain sadly disappointed with the golden apple that hangs just out of our reach.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been delving deep into that most familiar of economic sims….Used Car Purchasing 2K6. So far, there has been a bit of improvement to the interface over the last time I played this bastard (UCP 2000) with the rise in popularity of boston.craigslist.com and other helpful search and appraisal sites such as www.cars.com, www.edmunds.com, and of course good old www.kbb.com. Successfully completing the game requires a careful bit of micromanagement between the financial aspect, the availability of product selection, competition with the AI also gunning for that same model, and a whole bunch of luck with the behind-the-scenes dice rolls. I think I may be nearing the endgame, at which point I will be able to put this title down for another few years.

I need to buy a fucking lottery ticket.

Everybody say…”BONIVA”!!!!

Ahhhh..now this is what Winter Games is all about. Grim Fandango is one of the many titles I bought a long time ago and just never played. We’re talking about 6 or 7 years that this game has been sitting on my shelf waiting patiently to be picked up and enjoyed. Over the summer I finally installed it and began playing it as an unobtrusive game I could bring down to the Cape, and Winter Games 2006 has given me the excuse to throw unobtrusiveness aside and dive right back in.
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Rail-sliding wearing only sandals? Now that’s Real Ultimate Power!

If there’s one thing I keep confirming year after year, iteration after iteration, it’s that Splinter Cell is virtually unplayable during daylight hours. It’s a game that thrives on the dark in much the same way Doom or Silent Hill do and playing it in contrary conditions is robbing yourself of the heart of the experience (not to mention causing permanent eye damage squinting trying to make out what that dark blob is in the shadows behind the sun glare). Time to switch gears and get hopping on I-Ninja, a game I started this past summer down the Cape. Garnering all of my knowledge solely from videogames, the true ninja is faced with a profound choice of paths….the “Gaiden” road of the lithe, lethal, and brutally efficent assassin, or the “I” road of smack talk, overcaffeination, and hamsterball rolling.
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Fuck swords and tunics…the Prince got himself a gat!

Last night I loaded up the demo of Timeshift, a promising concept that I’ve been really excited about. It’s a short demo but it certainly gives you enough of an idea of how the play mechanics will work. The premise here is the usual pap about a future war but the hook is that you have a special suit that allows you to slow, stop, or reverse the flow of time around you while you remain unaffected. You are up against vastly superior enemies and firepower and they’ll cut you to ribbons if you don’t utilize these powers. Although it sometimes resembles a puzzle game, it’s open-ended enough in design that there can be several different solutions to completing your objectives. For instance, the last task on the demo required me to cross a courtyard to get into the parking garage on the other side. As soon as you enter the courtyard 2 turreted APC’s come rolling out from around the side of the building and start putting on the hurt. My first attempt, I decided to use Reverse and they backed up towards the garage allowing me to get far enough into the courtyard that I could hide in the bushes as they passed and then right run up and open the garage. Although this successfully beat the demo, I felt like I’d taken an easy way out so I reloaded the save point and attacked the APC’s by blowing up barrels and using Slow to slaughter the soldiers. Doing it this way triggered another cutscene and several more enemies to fight before the area would be clear enough to proceed.
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