As a prelude to what you’re about to hear, you should know that I am swearing at the top of my lungs and waving my arms wildly.
Spoliers and intense swearing ahead. Be warned.
(Read on …)

I’ve really gotten into the DS recently, and not just because I’ve been schlepping my ass across country every other week or so. Part of the reason I’m diggin’ it is because there are a lot of RPGs available and the games cost half of what you’d expect from any other console. The most recent hit has been Luminous Arc from Atlus and Marvelous Interactive.

It’s pretty standard Japanese RPG fare. The graphics and sound are pretty great, the characters are pretty interesting if a touch one-dimensional, and its got a good sense of humor. It’s a little bizarre at times though, both in its approach to male/female romance where it’s extra heavy on the double entendre and its use of a talking radish as a between-chapter moderator. The radish has its own story to tell, but frankly it makes no sense what so ever.

I also like the characters. Here are two:

Those Japanese are so wacky.

Let me give you a lightning round run-down on how I waste my time:

Gametap: meh, it’s okay, but I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t spend a monthly on it. Joust FTW.

World of Warcraft: I don’t quest as much as I used to, but I’m making hell of cash manufacturing bags of various types for auction. Which is sad.

Project: Snowblind: Brixtone claims it’s the spiritual successor to Deus Ex: Invisible War, but it’s just not as interesting, not to mention the “stealth” aspect is pointless when the “gross violence” option works better.

Overlord: Fun in concept and humorous in execution, but the gameplay is repetitive in some ways; I’m a big fan of Codemasters because of their innovation and writing, so you might want to peruse some of their other projects. In particular I am a fan of the oft overlooked title Second Sight.

Battlefield 2142: I made fun of Scrimpnut because he used to assert that Unreal Tournament was far superior to Quake 3 because the controls were better. Those of you who frequent this site may recognize that this is not the first time disagreements have been had. WASD and a mouse, how different can the controls be? As much as it pains me, and as much as my innards may twist with discomfort over admitting such a thing, he may have something going. Battlefield feels right. It feels the way I envision all shooters should respond. The controls are taut, the sensitivity is spot-on, and gunning soldiers down gives me a discomforting feeling of satisfaction. It’s only problem is that games can be laughably unbalanced. If your team doesn’t have its ducks in a row, expect to become enraged by frustration.

The really sad thing is that I have recently become engrossed with a relatively new game that I find utterly fascinating.

(Read on …)

I’m just going to pretend that I haven’t been persona non-grata for weeks and go ahead and talk about gaming as if I was never gone.

I will admit that a great deal of my absence has been… well let’s call it a “WoW related symptom.” I took my third character to level fifty-eight and Outland and frankly I’m not sure why. The mage character has been extremely enjoyable to play if for no other reason than the holy ass-whippings one can deliver with the myriad powers of the arcane at hand. My sister and I pulled off a double pass on Dragnut in the process - a feat which we bragged about but frankly had no right to do so. We suffered mightily in the action both mentally and physically. After a short period that can best be described as a cool-down, we’ve both quit playing. Not for long, I’m sure, but the itch has been scratched. Scratched till it bled.

In the brave new Minimally Single-player Offline world I have reverted to the classics of childhood. I have a GameTap subscription and I’m finding it to be interesting if not directly money expedient. The service is a mixed bag, mostly because I find the GameTap interface to be imperfect in its translation of controls. For example, the Quest for Glory games are a loss because the type-chat interface is fuxxored beyond usage. It’s a shame really, because those are games which I wish would be released in some sort of historical compilation. Turns out my dusty old DOS 3.50s don’t work so well anymore. There are lots of new games I haven’t tried yet though, most notably Overlord, Sam and Max, and the entire Hitman franchise.

Mostly I use it to play the old arcade classics. I used the power of infinite quarters to see levels of games I’m pretty sure are actually impossible to beat in their original arcade form without the expenditure of several months worth of laundry payments.  If I get my shit together I may make you a “guess this game” image collage with the shots I’ve been collecting, but it turns out my shit is scattered far and wide, scattered by the hand of a particularly spastic monkey. On the upside I found a game where I can score, get this, 200 trillion points and still not be on top of the leader board.
What else was I going to say…

I was in Boston for a job related conference last week, and I stopped in at Jeff’s to catch up and play Bioshock. It’s pretty fantastic. As a fan of the System Shock games I can tell you that they’ve really caught the feeling of the franchise. In all honesty I had to quit playing because the tension was making me sick to my stomach. I’m not sure that it’s better or worse that I’ve played System Shock, as I do not feel the burst of revulsion upon discovery of something awful, rather a long slow dread as the game foreshadows conventions I have seen in the past. I’ll let someone with more play under their belt review the game fully though, as I was drunk on cranberry and vodka at the time.

Mmm… vodka…

Sunday:

Tuesday:

Sundays where you’ve got nothing to do are the sort of days where you just have to sort of go out and see what happens. I had some errands to run, so I thought I’d do just that.

(Read on …)

I have a little dilemma here. Monday’s cast is supposed to feature a review of God of War 2 from yours truly. unfortunately, because of a series of mailing mishaps I am only now getting the game, two weeks after its release. So here’s the plan: I will stay up as long as I can tonight to see how much of the game I can complete before work tomorrow morning. There are interruptions coming tonight, to be sure, but I will keep you posted and we’ll see how much I can get done. Keep an eye out, or Kratos will put an eye out. OF YOU!

(Read on …)