Good times were had at the Marathon reunion. While Jeff had more kills, I certainly held my own on this particular shot with the SPANKER SSR. Judges? 9.8…9.7…9.5 (Those damn Germans).

Now only my shoes are annoyed…

With the help of a 10ft ADC extension from Dr. Bott and a 15 ft firewire cable, I’ve sucessfully put my noisy-ass G4 in the coat closet. I had to create some holes in the base board using a combination of drilling, hand sawing, jigsawing, and general cursing, but when I was through I could send monitor, ethernet, audio, firewire, power and Pro Tools cables through the wall. Now all that is left to do is put up acoustic foam and I can finally record vocals without a blanket over my head!

This isolation will also open up gaming possibilities as my wife can now stand being in the office while the computer is on. Time to crack open our copy of The Feeble Files and get gaming! If, that is, I can ever stop playing Nintendo…

I put together a movie synopsis of the story using various screenshots I had taken. Enjoy!

Best Game Ever

Thank you, Enzyte.

In a moment of financial weakness, I recently purchased the entire Onimusha trilogy for PS2. In a moment of studying weakness, I finished the first game Onimusha: Warlords. It casts you in the role of Samonosuke, a samurai who wanders into the middle of a bloody war between rival power-hungry clans. He shows up in response to a letter of distress from a spicy number named Princess Yuki. In a poor display of form one of the clans enlists the help of…evil. And where there’s evil, there’s an army of mindless zombies waiting to be hacked to pieces with a big sword.

Samonosuke collects orbs (read: spells) of thunder, fire and wind which he can cast at enemies in addition to his bloody sword-swinging. As the game progresses, he collects several other weapons like a bow and a matchlock. There are a few puzzles to deal with along the way which come from the standard Capcom puzzle design toolbox. The game feels a lot like Fable at times and it’s got some of my favorite game elements including but not limited to the following:

- Pre-gameplay disclaimer warning of realistic blood and gore
- Soul-stealing (made popular by Shang-Tsung back in 1992)
- Finishing attacks for fallen enemies to make them feel the burn
- Incongruous voice acting translated from the original Japanese

They are all slain. Gimme some bamboo.

In addition to all this greatness, the unlockable gameplay extra you receive at the end of this game tops most I’ve ever encountered. You are rewarded with a panda suit. Read that again. You, the bad-ass samurai, get a panda suit. Not only that but the previously unused L2 button on your controller can now be used to take the panda costume’s head on and off. I’m halfway tempted to finish this again just so I can watch a panda beat down legions of the damned.

The visuals, sound and music are quite good and the gameplay is very smooth. The opening cinematic is also insanely well done and is alone worth the $5.99 I paid for this title at EB Games. If you liked Fable, chances are you’ll like Onimusha too. Don’t be afraid to take a chance on a samurai with the heart of a panda or vice versa.

As part of Eat My Bomb’s “No Gamer Left Behind” faith-based initiative, a list of the five most recent posts is now available in the menu bar on the side of the site. This way our editors’ literary masterpieces will not be overlooked when the site gets several posts at once. This week’s seen a lot of activity. Keep it coming guys.

it’s EDUTAINMENT! Now that the Hellgate is closed, and until the holiday season is upon us, I’ve been reduced to downloading flash games from Miriam-Websters webpage. Yes, that’s right, the dictionary people. I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon not writing my thesis, but instead battling seven diabolical chickens who challenge me to spell as many words as possible with the letters they give me. Go to http://www.m-w.com/game/more.htm and download their free game, “Fowl Words” and give those chickens hell.

“S-H-I-M-M-E-R” Suck it, chicken!

ESTRAGON:
I can’t go on like this.
VLADIMIR:
That’s what you think.
ESTRAGON:
If we parted? That might be better for us.
VLADIMIR:
We’ll hang ourselves tomorrow. (Pause.) Unless Gordo comes.
ESTRAGON:
And if he comes?
VLADIMIR:
We’ll be saved.

As some of you were no doubt up late fighting aliens in Half Life 2 (if you even got far enough to have a gun yet), I was finishing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The last few levels were really exciting because the pace of the game changed. They take away your dagger and your ability to control time, but they give you a bad ass sword that kills enemies with one hit; they also increase the number of enemies. The action quickens and becomes more immediate. The puzzles have you crawling and swinging around the outside of a tower high above the ground. They did a good job giving you a sense of vertigo and making you feel you were really high up. Because you didn’t have your time dagger you died instantly with each misstep, but kindly there were hidden checkpoints at fair intervals so it wasn’t too frustrating.

The story at the end is excellent and has a nice “things have come full circle” feel to it. Though the final boss was a bit disappointing, the drama was still good.

Overall I think my attitude has changed. The fighting still needs improvement and some of the camera angles were awful, but overall a great game. I learned how to avoid getting overwhelmed by enemies and got in the habit of reversing time whenever they got a good hit off of me. Running the obstacles and advancing the story is well worth the mediocre fighting.

I was going to let Jeff borrow this, but I think he’ll be occupied for while…

So many parts….

Welp, thanks to Jeff S. I successfully modded my Xbox. With my new techonology I can finally play 8 bit games like Ninja Gaiden, Zelda, Donkey Punch and Bronco 2, and Jackal.

My first trip down memory lane was Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!! I was so obsessed with this game when I was a kid that I wrote a book on how to beat every fighter in the first round. I also made a chart on a big piece of poster board to track the progress of my two brothers and I. Each of us had a paper boxing glove that we would advance under portraits of each fighter we beat. At the end was a drawing of Little Mac surrounded by some ladies I had cut out of a bra catalog. Needless to say, I like this game.

I was happy to find that I remember pretty much everything about how to beat each guy. The toughest part has been adapting to the Xbox controller. It seems slower to respond than the Nintendo controllers. There are also two things that make Punch Out more difficult: the location of the start button, and the lack of a divot in the center of the D-pad. The start button location makes it hard to throw timely uppercuts while the lack of divet makes it harder to go from block to punch rapidly. Can anyone here devise a way to attach a Nintendo controller via the memory card slot and make it work with the emulator?

Gay by day…

Gay by night…

Who wants bomb? Do you, boy, do you? Good boy!

I just finished feeding the bomb to Doom3, so I thought I’d make one last entry, then call it quits on this title. Overall, I have to say that id did a good job with this game, but it’s not the kind of game that rewrites a genre. Although generally I couldn’t play this game for more than an hour or two because of my nerves (more on that later), on the occasions that could, I kept wishing the game would come to an end. However, I always came back to it and usually enjoyed it after a break.

There’s no question that technically this game was fantastic; the light and sound effects were phenomenal and I think they set a standard for future FPS games. Jeff once gave me grief for turning up the gamma correct on my games and made the comment, “if I’m not supposed to see it, I don’t want to see it.” Normally, I tell him to take the attitude back to Cuba, but on this occasion I have to agree. A big part of this game is the tension and suspense, and both the lighting and sound were critical aspects of the game as a whole. If the levels had been uniformly well lit it wouldn’t have been half as good. Things will skitter and breathe in the dark, shadows will shift and crawl, and I was never totally sure if I was alone or not.

The level design was also excellent. I genuinely felt claustrophobic on a number of occasions and the game really made me feel like I was on an oppressive and crumbling Mars station. One of the major themes of the game is creeping insanity, and wandering around the levels really makes you understand why everyone on Mars goes crazy eventually. I did have some gripes with the levels - particularly Hell which, for reasons I can’t pin down, I hated - but for the most part their worst sin was being a little long as a whole.

I had a few other, minor, complaints. Things like the lack of a decent long range weapon (I’ll admit to having sniper tendencies) and one of the genre’s worst cliche’s (being teleported to an alien world) are concessisons I’ll make to the Doom franchise: Doom1 had no sniper rifle, and Doom2 did take place in Hell. What I really hated though, was the I’ve-been-captured-and-lost-all-my-weapons moment. Is there ever really a useful point to that? It’s like getting slapped in the nuts: it doesn’t hurt too much, but it’s really insulting.

Replay value on this game is slim, especially given that most of the entertainment value is contained in shock and surprise, but admittedly I’m not a multiplayer kind of guy. I like to game like I like to drink: at home, alone, in the dark.

If you’re going to play this game, though, you really should do it alone in the dark. This is the first game in a long time that genuinely had my heart pumping and my hands shaking. It sounds juvenile, but I never played this game expecting to get a good night’s sleep afterwards - it’s really that startling. Despite the fact that it was a little repetitive (basically you got ambushed in every room), knowing there was a trap didn’t make setting it off any better.

If you want to get surprised - a lot - definitely pick this game up, but don’t feel like you can’t wait for the discounts to kick in.

I think they’re trying to say “John Carmack has your money.”