Author: Jeremy Voss

Musician, wanna-be writer, suburban husband and father. I'll occasionally tweet from @couchshouts. You can find me on XBL, PSN and Steam as JervoNYC.

>PSP’d!

>So I couldn’t contain myself any longer; on my lunch hour today, I went to the Best Buy over on 5th Avenue and bought:

  • PSP slim
  • 2gb memory stick
  • Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
  • God of War: Chains of Olympus
  • MLB08
  • GTA: Liberty City Stories
  • GTA: Vice City Stories

Total: $400.13. It’s burning a hole in my bag; all I want to do is rip open the box and start playing, but I know that as soon as I do, I’ll start getting super-busy at work, and in any event, I didn’t buy any sort of carrying case, and I don’t really want to have it just sitting loose in my bag.

That said. This is a watershed moment: this is my first piece of Sony-manufactured gaming equipment that I’ve ever purchased. I played a lot of PS1 at my buddy Jongre’s apartment back in my post-college years (mostly the Oddworld games, with some Crash Bandicoot here and there), but never owned one myself; I bought a Dreamcast instead of a PS2, and then bought an Xbox; I had a Gameboy and then a DS, which covered my handheld needs, and I’m still holding off on a PS3 until later this year.

The PSP, though… it’s strange. I’ve wanted one ever since they announced it, but then the dead pixel thing happened when it launched and outraged everybody, and until recently there’s been almost nothing worth playing on it. Plus, that horrendous “all i want for christmas is a psp” fake-commercial really turned me off – even now I’ve got that fucking song stuck in my head.

I’ve seen people playing it on the subway and I’m always curious to see it in action, and yet I never really get that good a look; display units at stores are generally useless, since they’re (a) never turned on or (b) playing something I don’t care about.

There are other games that I’m curious to check out…

  • Lumines (although I’ve already got it on XBLA, and I’m not very good at it)
  • the 3d Castlevania game
  • Wipeout / Wipeout Pure
  • flOw
  • Jean D’arc
  • Disgaea (or however you spell it)

…but I’m not, like, foaming at the mouth for any of them, and I’m sure I can track them down on GameFly.

If I have time tonight, I’ll try to have a full rundown for tomorrow.

>Bully; Flatout

>This lead-up to GTA4’s release is killing me; nothing but crap for new releases. So while I’m bulldozing my way through Bully, I’m also catching up on some older titles via GameFly.

Flatout: Ultimate Carnage is a game I wanted to love; I was a fan of the original title on the Xbox and I was looking forward to the inevitable next-gen entry. In some ways, it’s great: it’s gorgeous, and even with 12 cars driving through dirt and running over piles of tires and debris, it always maintains a smooth frame rate. However, it’s also frustratingly difficult. I won my first few races pretty easily (and the rubber-band AI was actually pretty effective in carving out some exciting victories), and then, suddenly, I was getting my ass kicked left and right, and no amount of restarting (or car-tuning) made any discernible difference. Which sucks.

And as for Bully: I finished Chapter 2 last night. Probably 12-15 hours in at this point. What does it say about me that my main priority with this game was to make sure I attended and excelled in every class? At this point, though, I’m glad I’ve been so studious – it’s unlocked lots of useful skills. My biggest complaint in Bully is that the game clock moves at a tremendous rate, and I feel like there’s never any real time to explore or do anything, which somewhat defeats the purpose of playing in a sandbox. Each day in Bully, for me, goes something like this:

8:00: wake up, save game.
9:00: find class, do class.
11:30: save.
1:00: class.
3:30: save.
3:30-12:00 – jobs/missions/errands/exploration.

Which is, in some ways, what real life is like. Except that in Bully, one minute = one second, so each afternoon I feel like I only have time to do one or two things. With so many cops around, truancy is a dangerous option. This is why I feel compelled to complete all my classes, so that I don’t have to hang around the school.

Anyway. I’m not sure it will get me through until GTA4’s release, but it’ll have to do for now.

>None More Black

>

Ian:     The moment we've all been waiting for...Here we go, plenty for
        everybody...here you are.
David:   I never thought I'd see...I never thought I'd live to see the day.
Ian:     What do you think?
Derek:   Is this the test pressing?
Ian:     No, this is it, yes, that's right...
David:   This is "Smell The Glove" by Spinal Tap....
Ian:     That's "Smell The Glove" that's, that's the jacket cover, it's
        going out across the country in every store.
David:   This is the compromise we made...this is the compromise you made?
Ian:     Yes.
Derek:   Is it going to say anything here, or here along the spine?
David:   It's not going to say anything?
Ian:     No, it's not going to say anything.
Nigel:   It's going to be like this, all black...
Ian:     No, it's going to be that simple, beautiful, classic!
Viv:     Does look a little bit like, you know, black leather...
Derek:   You can see yourself in... both sides.
David:   I feel so bad, I feel so bad about this...
Nigel:   It's like a black mirror.
David:   Well, I think it looks like death...it looks like mourning.  I mean it looks...
Ian:     David, David, every, every movie, in every cinema is about death;
        death sells!
Nigel:   I think he's right, there is something about this, that's that's
        so black, it's like; "How much more black could this be?"
        and the answer is: "None, none... more black."

Played some more Condemned 2 last night, and after about an hour or so I felt compelled to turn it off and stick it back in the GameFly envelope, to be returned and never seen again. It’s not a bad game, it’s just so relentlessly bleak and dark and there’s only so much I can take. The game’s first few levels are so black that your flashlight barely makes an impression; I felt like I was developing glaucoma.

There’s also that slight but glaring plot hole, which happens to be the same one as in the previous game, namely: you’re a detective, investigating various grotesque homocides, and yet the game’s actual mechanic is about you violently and savagely beating other people to death with your own bare hands (and blunt objects).

I did make it far enough into the game to see what the new CSI business is all about, and it’s much improved over the first game; I’m not a forensics expert, of course, and so I apparently did get a few things wrong, but I appreciate the incorporation of “interpretation” – it’s not just that you’re looking for clues, it’s that you are trying to figure out what they mean. Granted, this really only took up about 5% of my playtime, and often times my investigation was hampered by yet another crazy man beating me with a stick, but still: they heard the problems and they fixed them.

Still, though – I’m not sure I’m that passionate about the franchise anymore. The first game was legitimately creepy (especially the department store level); this game is just morbid, and there’s a distinct difference. Creepiness is enticing; morbidity is just depressing.

>Odd One Out

>Stupid title, I know. I’m feeling a little braindead, is the thing. See, I just spent the better part of the last 2 days plowing through the end of Lost Odyssey.

Final tally: a little over 70 hours, 4 main characters at level 81. That’s a LOT of random encounters, let me tell you.

I’d love to post a well-written, considered review of the game, but I can’t, and it’s my wife’s fault. My wife is incredibly patient and tolerant of my gaming hobby, but in the case of LO, she couldn’t take the battle soundtrack anymore, and when the game’s random encounter setting is arbitrarily set to “every 5 steps you take”, I had to admit: she was absolutely right. There’s only so many times you can hear that theme before your brain starts to hurt. And so I spent the last 15 hours of the game with the sound off, and my iPod on. (This made for quite a few comical moments, actually; during one of the climactic battles at the very end, my iPod decided to play “Ripple” by the Grateful Dead, which had to be the most wrong music to be playing at that moment.)

And, really, I wonder how much I missed out, playing the game with the sound off. By the 60th hour or so, I didn’t really need to hear the characters recite poorly-written dialog – especially since I’d had the sound set to Japanese because the English voice acting was grating and annoying. It was pretty clear what I needed to be doing, anyway, and to be honest I kinda just wanted to finish the damn thing so I could start Bully and Condemned 2 in earnest.

In a way, that’s part of the problem with the mechanics of JRPGs; most of my time over the last few days was simply grinding the shit out of my characters, and that’s not emotionally gratifying or anything. I was having fun, sure – I was grinding with a purpose – but it didn’t really have anything to do with the game.

(I should also say that I didn’t necessarily intend to grind the shit out of my characters. I was attempting to deal with the Temple of Enlightenment, and I kept getting wiped out, so I ventured out and dealt with some other side quests, and by the time I was ready to deal with the ToE, the game’s random-encounter setting was off the goddamned charts. Seriously – it took me somewhere between 8-10 hours to finish that dungeon, and by the time I finally got out I’d leveled up my party by at least 10 levels, and so the final final dungeon was a goddamned cakewalk.)

The pacing at the end of the game was a little weird, too; I’d spent 15 hours actively playing and running and killing and puzzling, and then, in the last battle, after the umpteenth press of the “Attack” command, there was suddenly a 20 minute cutscene – easily the longest one in the game – and by that point all I wanted was to get to the credits so I could get my 125 Points and be done with the goddamned thing.

I’m making this sound a lot more negative than I actually feel. I did have some fun this weekend with the game, I swear – it’s just that I wasn’t playing the game, I was going through the motions because my iPod was a thousand times more interesting than the same battle music over and over and over again.

Anyway. I’m done with it. I got something like 840 points out of 1000, and I’m not totally sure I’m going to try to get the rest – not with Bully and Condemned (and maybe R6:Vegas?) and GTA4 on the way.

At the very least, here’s what I can say about it – even with the conditions I was playing under, it was infinitely more satisfying than Blue Dragon.

>Back in NYC

>It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, which is understandable as I was in London all of last week and, therefore, completely out of the game-playing loop. I came home to find a GameFlown copy of Condemned 2 waiting for me, which was nice, except… I played it for about 30 minutes and had to turn it off.

The problem with Condemned 2 is simply that it’s relentlessly bleak and ugly and fucking horrifying, and that’s not necessarily a mood that I can just jump into after coming back from a vacation. I still do absolutely want to play it, but I need to be in the right mood, and as of yet I’ve just not been yearning to climb into an abyss of morbid death.

To be honest, I’ve not really been yearning to play much of anything these days; I do need to finish Lost Odyssey (and I really, really want to finish it), and now that it’s been patched I want to start up on Bully. But I’m not, like, making time for those games right now; I’ve not kicked my wife out of the living room because I’ve got to get my fix.

That being said, I think it’s fair to say that I am officially beyond-hyped up for GTA4, now that the info and screenshots are coming on a regular basis and we’re getting massive previews in magazines. I am indeed contemplating taking that week off from work. I’ve written more than a few times on my old GS blog about my infatuation for the franchise; it’s one of the only game franchises that I care about so deeply that I feel protective over it. I might even go as far to say that it’s why I enjoyed Saint’s Row as much as I did; SR was the most obvious clone there’s ever been and nobody was ready to hate it more than me, and yet it was also the most playable and genuinely enjoyable, and it actually raised my expectations for what GTA4 needed to do. If SR had any particular failing (aside from being unoriginal), it was that it was forgettable; I spent a great deal of time playing that game, but I find that I can’t really remember anything about the city, whereas I remember almost every inch of GTA3, Vice City and San Andreas, and for me, that’s really the make-or-break criteria for these sandbox games – the sandboxes themselves. There’s lots of games now where you can simply run around in a nonlinear fashion, exploring at random or just blowing shit up, but the GTA games absolutely excel at creating memorable, believable environments. SR was just a city; it had all the major elements a city needs to be plausible, but the city itself didn’t really have any style. GTA3’s version of Liberty City may be primitive by today’s technological standards, but that city made sense. Vice City was very clearly a place; you knew right off the bat where (and when) you were, and San Andreas took that concept and multiplied it by a billion.

So what gets me so incredibly excited about GTA4, then, is that they didn’t take my idea of expanding on the LA/SanFran/Vegas concept of San Andreas and blowing it up to be the entire country of England (although, let’s be honest, that would fucking rule – who wouldn’t want to blow up Stonehenge? and can you imagine that soundtrack?); instead, rather than painting in broad strokes, they decided to reinterpret Liberty City to be as real and as detailed as possible. Now, maybe it’s just because I’ve lived in and around New York City for all of my 32 years, but I absolutely cannot wait to run around and see what this new Liberty City is like. My favorite moments in playing GTA games have always come from simply exploring what there is to see. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; one of my all-time favorite moments in all my years of gaming was going to the cliff behind the mobster’s house in GTA3 and watching the sun rise, if only because that was the first time I’d ever been given the opportunity to do something that innocent. (I suppose I’ll have no choice, then, but to go down to the Liberty City equivalent of the South Street Seaport and watch the sun rise there, too, since that’s something I’ve actually done in real life.)

Work beckons. Anyway, this post was simply to say that I’m still alive and will (hopefully) be posting more frequently, even if nobody’s reading. I actually do have some other things I want to talk about – especially about my initial disappointment in what’s happening with GiantBomb.

>A Quick One Before He Goes Away

>Tomorrow I leave for London for a week; family vacation. In other words, plenty of DS time during the down time. I bought Wordjong because, well, I like word games and puzzle games, and that’s as good a combination of both as there is on the DS right now. It’s fine, I just wish there was more to it; or, at least, that the bottom screen was a little bigger.

And as long as we’re talking about word/puzzle games, I would LOVE to see a Scrabble game for the DS, but which would also include Scrabble Blast and Scrabble Rack – both of which are available free online, and both of which would greatly enhance a DS Scrabble cartridge. (Blast is a Boggle-y sort of game, and Rack is an anagram/word finding game, both of which I’ve spent too many workplace hours with.)

I had just enough time last night to try out my GameFlown copies of MLB2K8 and Bully; I want to keep my queue intact for when I get back, and that would mean having a copy of Condemned 2 waiting to be opened. Quick impressions:

It took me exactly 3 minutes of gameplay to tell me that MLB2K8 absolutely sucks. Say what you will about EA and Madden, and how fucking terrible it is that EA basically eliminated the NFL2K series – and I’ve said it – at least Madden still manages to be playable, year after interminable year. I was pleased that the MLB2K series was able to snag exclusive baseball rights, if only to serve as a nice “fuck you” to EA, but by the same token, they’ve done absolutely NOTHING with the privilege; if anything, they’ve managed to make each successive year’s game somehow worse. I will never understand why I should have to re-learn how to play the same baseball game I’ve been playing for years, especially when the new changes feel incredibly unintuitive and unnecessary, and ESPECIALLY when there are still horrendous problems that never get fixed. MBL2K8 is somehow uglier than 2K7, which seems preposterous. I didn’t even get 2 outs into the top of the 1st inning before I knew that it just wasn’t worth it.

Conversely, it took me about 10 minutes to realize that I’m going to want to spend some serious time with Bully; I was only able to do see the first few cutscenes and get into a few fistfights before I had to turn it off, but I’m intrigued. When I get back from London, my plan is to finish Lost Odyssey and then work with Bully until GTA4 drops. Sounds like a plan.

>Hypothetical Question #1

>
This image comes from Xbox360 Fanboy’s preview of the upcoming Xbox360 game Dark Sector. Dark Sector is not a game I care about, and Xbox360 Fanboy has clearly altered this image with a fake achievement. Which brings me to this inaugural installment of “Hypothetical Question.”

HQ#1 – Would you play an Xbox360 game if it had the potential for 2000 Achievement Points, but also had the ability to lower your overall Gamerscore if you played it poorly?

>Further into the Odyssey

>Disc 3, ~ 32 hours in, party is between levels 31-36.

Look, I know I’m a JRPG neophyte, and my frame of reference w/r/t these games is incredibly limited, but GODDAMN. It’s all I’ve been playing for the last week. I very nearly called in sick today just so I could pull a marathon session.

Combat continues to be enjoyable, which is saying a LOT considering how tedious random encounters can be. I’m starting to be able to craft some pretty bad-ass rings, which in a way hearkens back to the Alchemy portions of Oblivion (when I first got into Oblivion, I was obsessed with harvesting ingredients). The dialog is hit-or-miss (why are there no dialog-writing seminars at GDC?) but the story is engaging, and the characters are just 3-dimensional enough to keep everything interesting. The voice actor doing Jansen – I love this guy. I’m not sure he’s ever played a videogame before, because he’s definitely NOT adhering to the usual standard of line readings (which the rest of the LO cast is guilty of); I hope this guy continues to get work, he’d be especially great with in a Bioware setting.

But again – I’ve never played any of the FF games (except for III on my DS, and I never got very far into it), nor any of the other major franchises or one-offs – so consider my recommendation accordingly.

>FEZ!

>I’ve been busy as hell lately, and meanwhile my Google Reader has been exploding left and right with GDC coverage. Which is why I’m so happy to have taken 5 minutes to actually read through some of the stuff that’s being reported on [most of which revolves around Too Human (which might not suck after all), Fable 2 (yes please) and/or the Gears of War 2 non-trailer], because I just saw this video for FEZ, which appears to be an upcoming XBLA game, and it’s blowing my fucking mind.

(There’s a better trailer for this here, which I can’t embed for some reason.)
http://www.gametrailers.com/remote_wrap.php?mid=30850

>Halfway through the Odyssey

>Just got to Disc 3 in Lost Odyssey; a little over 22 hours, with most of my party at or around lvl 30. Having not played very many JRPGs, it’s obviously beyond my reach to say how it compares with all the hordes of titles already out there, but in terms of what I have played, I think it’s fucking fantastic. The story and script may be generic and ridiculous, but the characters are richly drawn and the voice acting – for the most part – is outstanding. The environments are very nicely varied, and almost all of them look quite beautiful. There’s really only been one or two moments in the game that really got on my nerves, one of which took place during a dreadfully inopportune time (as I was very much on the edge of tears (!)), and another which was simply a frustrating and surprising radical shift in difficulty (which, after (*sigh*) consulting a walkthrough, was dealt with rather quickly). It’s not without its faults, and it could be said that the turn-based combat system in general feels archaic and anachronistic these days, but for what it is, it’s outstanding.

A special shout-out needs to go to the dreams, which (I believe) were written by Jay Rubin, whom you may have heard of if you’ve ever read the English translations of Haruki Murakami’s novels. Some reviews said that the dreams slowed the game’s already slow pace down to a crawl, because who the hell wants to read when they’re playing a game, and they do have a point; it’s just that the dreams here are so well written and so interesting, and if they were ever published in book form, I’d buy them immediately.

Also: finished Professor Layton over the weekend. It was a lot of fun, and the feeling of conquering a devilish riddle cannot be understated. Still, though, there’s not much left to do with it besides bringing it to a wi-fi access point and downloading new riddles, which is kinda the problem; once you know the answer, the game loses its point. That said, I’ve got a long plane flight coming up in March, and there were a few riddles that I either never solved or never found; it would certainly be nice to spend a little more time in St. Mystere.