Category: ramblings

>’Tis the season. To gather with friends and loved ones, to decorate the tree, to light the Menorah, to sip a cup of eggnog before a blazing fireplace, to do the Feats of Strength, and to be dragged kicking and screaming from one’s delicious HD/surround setup to spend two weeks in a realm of cruel, offline, two-speaker, 4:3, 480p squalor.

That’s right. It’s time once again to pack the kids (360, daughter, PS3) in the car to do some Christmasing at the parents’ house in New York, and then off for a rustic New Years’ Eve with the in-laws at their country cottage in Quebec. In both locations, I will be condemned to playing my 360 and PS3 on SD TV’s. In Quebec, I won’t have Internets. Not even French ones.

Now, I’m enough of a hardcore nerd purist that I’m reluctant to play through any new AAA content on these antediluvian “televisions”. So Gears 2, Fallout 3, Fable 2… all off the table. So how best to use the gaming time I do have? What does one play in SD?

I can tell you that there will be a lot of Rock Band 2 going on, since I have a passel of siblings who will be in New York to rock it out. I’ve also concluded that my time in SD purgatory is ideal for going back and trying great older games that I never got around to, and probably wouldn’t otherwise. Better to play them in SD than not at all . Last holiday season, I made my way through COD2 (which was terrific enough that I played it again in HD/surround once I got home), and played through most of Tomb Raider Anniversary (not a game that really flexes the 360’s 1080p muscles anyway).

I’m thinking this year I’ll finish TR: Anniversary, and maybe start Legend if I’m not all Lara’d out. And while I’m in New York, and at least have XBL access, I’ll probably burn a lot of time with Left 4 Dead, because even SD can’t take the sheen off that mofo. And of course, Psychonauts is still sitting on my pile of shame. I got a good ways in on the original Xbox, but never actually finished it. (Don’t tell Jervo.) I guess I can also try to get through some more GTAIV.

Plus Ima pick up Chrono Trigger for the DS.

Okay, so maybe the next two weeks won’t be the fun famine I made it out to be.

>I’m offering no commentary on this just yet; it’s gigantic, I’m very busy and I’m really just posting here so I don’t forget about it. This looks to be the beginning of a mega-discussion on all sorts of important videogame topics, featuring quite a few heavy hitters, and I’m sure I’ll need to vent my spleen accordingly.

Videogame Symposium Part I – Review Scores

Are reviews primarily a consumer guide, or should they serve another purpose? Do review scores deter intelligent discussion of videogames? Is the presence or absence of a review score the only difference between a reviewer and a critic? What is the role of the reviewer when the Internet is democratizing published opinion? How should reviews and reviewers evolve in light of the emergence and growth of Flash games, small games, indie games and user-generated games?

These questions and more were on the mind of N’Gai Croal, John Davison and Shawn Elliott last summer when they decided to expand their conversation to a number of noted reviewers, writers, bloggers and journalists for a published email symposium on game reviews. (See below for the full list of participants.) The planned list of topics include Review Scores; Review Policy, Practice and Ethics; Reader Backlash; Reviews in the Age of Social media; Reviews in the Mainstream Media; Casual, Indie, and User-Generated Games; Reviews vs. Criticism; and Evolving the Review. Round 1’s topic: Review Scores.

Participants

Leigh Alexander, Gamasutra/Sexy Videogameland/Variety

Harry Allen, Media Assassin

Robert Ashley, freelancer

Tom Chick, freelancer

N’Gai Croal, Level Up/Newsweek

John Davison, What They Play

Shawn Elliott, 2K Boston

Jeff Gerstmann, Giant Bomb

Kieron Gillen, Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Dan Hsu, Sore Thumbs Blog

Francesca Reyes, Official Xbox Magazine

Stephen Totilo, MTV News

>X-Play has named Fable 2 its Game of the Year.

My feelings about Fable 2 can be summed up by a quotation from Emperor Nero (as portrayed by Dom Deluise in History of the World Part I): “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling… but nice.”

Full disclosure: I’m only about six hours in. But I’m still waiting for the game to grab me. From what I hear the game only gets better (and in fact gets considerably better) from here. But my question is this: If I have to wait for six hours to get to the real meat, is that really GOTY material? Aren’t plenty of people going to move on before they get through to the great part, especially in this environment awash with AAA titles?

Now I’ve also read on the Internets that people who don’t lurve Fable 2 may be “playing it wrong”. You are now reading on the Internets my view that people who say that naysayers who fail to see a game’s brilliance are “playing it wrong” deserve nothing less than a swift kick in the bag. If I’m playing it wrong, you designed it wrong. (I don’t mean you specifically… except for you, Mr. Molyneux.)

Anyway, I don’t mean to rob Fable 2 of its moment. Huzzah and congrats and all that good stuff. I actually believe that there’s a fair chance that I will play all the way through it and fall in love with it, and maybe by then I’ll be so enamoured that I’ll have forgotten how enthralled I wasn’t for the first six hours. So listen up, posterity!

Gred’s review of Fable 2 at 6 hours in: B

Which reminds me. I far prefer letter grades to numbered reviews. Note to self for future post…

>Okay, there are gonna be some changes around here. What this blog needs is some international flavour.

That’s right. I spelled flavour with a “u”. You see, up here in Canada, if the Queen tells me I have to include a “u” when I bitch about horse armour as paid DLC, well then I’m gonna do as Her Highness commands, God save the crazy ol’ broad.

So you know I’m in Canada. What else can I tell you? In a nutshell: I’m an old friend of Jervo’s, used to live with him in NYC, and have lived up here since I escaped the U.S. in an air balloon during the early years of the Bush presidency. I also sometimes play video games.

So for starters, let me try to give you a snapshot of Gred the gamer.

Systems owned and selected favoUrite games, off the top of my head:

• various PCs (Grim Fandango);
• Atari 2600 (multiplayer Maze Craze);
• ColecoVision (maybe Smurf, even though I now know it sucked?);
• NES (probly Zelda 2);
• Super NES (Act Raiser);
• Game Boy (Tetris);
• Genesis (I’m totally flaking);
• Turbo Grafx 16 (couldn’t tell ya);
• Nintendo 64 (Super Mario 64 (never played Ocarina of Time (I know!!!)));
• PlayStation (Syphon Filter);
• Dreamcast (NFL 2K series);
• Xbox (SW: KOTOR);
• Xbox 360 (Hannah Montana’s Terrorist Hunt);
• Nintendo DS (Puzzle Quest);
• PlayStation 3 (LittleBigPlanet).

Truth is, my favourite 360 pick is in flux, so I’m just not ready to commit right now. On we go:

Best Game Evar: Grim Fandango

Other honourable mentions: Battlefield 1942, Psychonauts, Stuff made by Valve, Front Page Sports Football series, the old Sierra adventure games

Recent crushes: Left 4 Dead, GTA IV, Portal, LittleBigPlanet, Bioshock… I guess, you know, the totally predictable this-gen hits. And also MLB 2008: The Show.

Favourite gaming podcasts: Joystiq, CAGcast, 1UP FM (and the late, great Game Theory, may it rest in peace)

Gamertag: Gr3d

PSN: GeeRed

So there’s a little background. Stay tuned! You never know when I might have a coherent though about something you’re interested it.

>The big news, as alluded to earlier, is that Shouts From The Couch will no longer be a solitary endeavor. I am very pleased to welcome the lovely and talented Gred to the SFTC empire, who will be popping in here every so often to wax philosophical about, well, whatever it is that strikes his fancy. I am told he will be making an introductory post tomorrow, so prepare yourselves accordingly.

>Had a pretty busy weekend, but was able to get in some time with a rental copy of Mirror’s Edge.

I argued for a parkour game a million years ago on my old blog and while Mirror’s Edge isn’t what I had in mind, it’s the closest thing there is right now. (Prince of Persia doesn’t count, even though it kinda should.)

Mirror’s Edge has a lot of great things going for it: a simple control scheme that isn’t intuitive the first time you play it but very quickly becomes second nature, a fantastic visual design, a female protagonist that isn’t overly sexualized or half-naked, and, well, a unique concept that’s actually compelling. And when the game is cooking, goddamn, it’s just a hell of a lot of fun to play.

It’s also got some maddening problems, and this is ultimately why I elected to return it instead of trying to finish it. And the problems here are the same problems that Prince of Persia had, and even the recent Tomb Raider games have had; the combat fucking sucks. The combat sucks especially bad in Mirror’s Edge because your character is incredibly fragile and if you mis-time the buttonpress to disarm your attacker, you are totally fucked, always. The enemy AI is dirt-stupid and yet also psychic; they will stand in the middle of a hallway and shoot you, but they also seem to know where you are even when you’re totally hidden from view. At the point I stopped playing last night, I had tried and re-tried this one particular section at the very end of Chapter 5 about 30 different times, and when I finally succeeded it wasn’t through skill but through sheer dumb luck, and so when I finished the level I didn’t feel rewarded, only pissed off. I knew what I was supposed to do, and the game felt like it was broken at that particular point, and there was no way of getting around it.

It’s an ambitious game and, again, when the game is working, it’s exhilarating and breathtaking and everything I’d hoped it would be. It just feels like in every game of this type, the developer feels compelled to break up the awesome running-jumping bits with combat, which slows the pace down and never feels quite right. Either cut out the combat all together, or treat the combat as less of an afterthought and more of something just as integral to the game. Of all the games that ever did this sort of thing, Crackdown is the only one I’ve ever played that really felt like it could handle both, and what’s funny is that Crackdown wasn’t necessarily about either.

>Back in a big way, actually. The summer gaming doldrums have hit us here at SFTC HQ quite hard, and not even Braid, Eden or GeoWars2 – all of which are excellent in their own unique ways – could do anything to relieve them.

But then I decided to rent Civilization Revolution for the 360, and now I’m afraid I’ve gone and unleashed some feral nightmare into my brain. After deciding to purchase my GameFly copy Friday night, I was (kinda) exiled from my living room on Saturday, so I ended up downloading Civ 4 – and its 2 expansions – over Steam; and then, to top it all off, I traded in some old 360 games on the way back from Pineapple Express (meh) on Sunday towards preorders of Fable 2 and LittleBigPlanet, and also CivRev for the DS.

And here’s the funny part – I suck at Civ. I suck at strategy games in general, and I normally don’t even bother, but I was playing Pirates! the other day and I realized how much I’d missed it, and being that Sid Meier has such an impressive pedigree I figured it couldn’t hurt to give CivRev a shot, especially considering how little else there is to do these days. And the truth is, it really is fun. As with Pirates, SM has a great interface and the gameplay is simplified enough for the console so that everything makes sense, once you understand how the concepts work. I can’t say the concepts have fully taken hold for me just yet – it took about 4 hours on the PC, 2 hours on the 360 and a multiplayer session with a friend and about 15 minutes on the DS for me to figure out that I’ve been playing Civ as if it were SimCity, which it most definitely is NOT.

I wonder if this is going to get me into strategy games; I suspect that it will not, if only because I tooled around with C&C and the LOTR strategy games on the 360 and couldn’t make heads or tails of them at all, and gave up after about 30 minutes or so. But then, those games kinda missed the point a little bit – so much fuss was made about how those games were dramatically retooled in order to be workable on a controller, when instead the retooling should have been about how to make those games approachable to a strategy neophyte; after all is said and done, they’re still hard-core strategy games and having a simplified control scheme didn’t change the fact that I had no fucking idea what I was doing or why. CivRev on the 360, on the other hand, is incredibly simple to control – it’s as intuitive as it can be – and so instead the focus is very much about showing you what you’re supposed to do, and why you’re supposed to do it. (Granted, a lot of it is still lost on me, but that’s only because I haven’t had enough time to even finish 1 game on the 360.)

The PC version, on the other hand, is vastly more complex, but it’s still very approachable, and you can automate a lot of menial tasks so that you can better concentrate on the bigger picture. It’s a little surprising to me that of all 3 versions I now own, I’ve only finished a game on the PC.

I wonder if I should start getting excited for Starcraft 2.