Son - “Hey Daddy?”
Dad - “Yes Son?”
Son - “How are babies made?”
Dad - “
Son - “Yipee!!!”
Unless your electricity has been out all week, you’ve heard the hubbub about GTA: San Andreas and the hidden sex minigame called “hot coffee”. It has become yet another milestone in the children and video games debate. If you need to catch up you can read about it here and see some video of the mod in action here.
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?
Recently fellow blogger Chris Karr and I trekked over to the Wideload Games office to interview Alex Seropian. If you haven’t heard of Alex Seropian, you’ll certainly know some of the video games he was instrumental in creating: Halo, Myth, Oni, and Marathon, among others.
Alex was the cofounder of Bungie Studios, a Chicago-based video game company which was acquired by Microsoft in order to create games (such as Halo) for the Xbox. After Halo was released, Alex left Bungie and Microsoft to create a new game company called Wideload Games in 2003. Wideload is currently in working on its first release–a game called Stubbs the Zombie–which breaks the mold of your typical zombie video game.
As I walk into the office, Alex is very friendly; he walks right up and starts talking with us. I don’t immediately realize who he was; I expect to see an old eccentric guy who has the scars of being through the creative yet rough video game industry.
Fed up with having to listen to 150 crappy bands that all sound the same while you game? Why not make use of the recent phenomenon of customizable gaming soundtracks? With the Xbox, you can load in your own music, create playlists, and then use those playlists as in-game soundtracks. I’ve used this feature on several titles such as Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Amped 2, ESPN NFL 2K5 which actually lets you create clips, and most recently Jeff and I put this feature to great use while playing Burnout 3.
My friend Tom just slapped me with this link. Old people are funny.
I know that the spirit of Summer Games 2005 is to finish off the unfinished projects lying around my desk in order to make room for the hot new holiday releases looming in the future, but I just couldn’t resist taking another pass through Fallout 2. I took a different route this time, though: I decided to play the game by my own rules and see just how much content there was to be had. The answer? A lot.
This still gives me goosebumps.
Imagine you’re floating down a river… What do you see?… What smells are present?…
After that really hard first level, things have gotten more reasonable in Hitman 2. The open gameplay is a lot of fun especially if you acheive your objective without anyone hearing you and can roam around afterwards and mess with people. The enemy AI goes down the toilet as soon as they engage fire with you. You just have to hide around a corner and wait for them to run right into the pile of dead bodies on the ground.
I’m finding the map system annoying. There isn’t a quick key for one thing, it’s hard to see where the sewers line up with the street map, and when you’re right outside the door to the next floor it’s difficult to keep track of who might be behind the door on floor two while keeping watch for guards climbing the stairs behind you on the first floor.
Minor gripes aside this game is looking great and I can already tell it’s got replay value galor.
End transmission.
The Devil’s Booze
After 4 years of restarting, lost saved game files and botched skill trees I finally fed the bomb to Diablo 2 on Tuesday night. I’m clearly the last guy on Earth to finish this game so I’ll spare you the details of the game (fantastic) and instead share with you the details of my post-game celebration. I tracked down a 2004 cabernet sauvignon called Casillero del Diablo. It is deep but not heavy on the palate and finishes with warm hints of fruit. It’s visuals and overall production values are outstan….. it tasted good. I drank it and became inebriated. Grim Fandango has dropped into its slot in my PC portion of Summer Games 2005.
It’s official. Tim is the spawn of Beelzebub and has forever burned my soul with the sounds and visions from the Playstation 2 thriller, “Mad Maestro”. In keeping with the phrase “Good things come to those who wait”, Mad Maestro takes the wit of B.A. Baracus, the soothing voice of Uni from Dungeons and Dragons, the likeability of Scrappy Doo, and the velvety skin of Edward James Olmost and wraps it up into, truly, the most horrible, but for our purposes, most wonderful Secret Satan Game EVER.
If you don’t get this right, Mothra will dump this coffee on me.
Basically, the game involves hitting the X button to the tune of all the beats of famous classical pieces. Thank God that Bachman Turner Overdrive didn’t make its way into this gem. It’s more or less Dance Dance Revolution with your thumb – half the exercise, twice the carpel tunnel.
You get points for landing the beat perfectly and the amount of pressure can vary depending on the note. If you miss the note too quickly or slowly, you lose points. This format is integrated with wonderfully conceived Japanese to American storylines throughout the game. The depth of the dialogue rivals “Revenge of the Sith” and “Resident Evil 1 (I hope this isn’t Chris’ blood)”.
Is this the entrance to the Norway ride in Epcot?
Strangely enough, I will forge on as I want to see if indeed I can conduct even the most difficult of classical pieces with a drunken thumb. Apologies for the delay in the Secret Satan post. Like pulling a band-aid off that hairy part of your arm, just wasn’t emotionally ready to do it yet.
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.
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.
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.
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.
