Category: ramblings

>Lego Indiana Jones and the Quest for Attainable Achievements

>Funny thing happened yesterday. My copy of Lego Indiana Jones arrived via Gamefly, and even though I had a million things to do, I felt compelled to pop it in and check it out. About 30 minutes later, I’d unlocked 2 or 3 Achievements, and I suddenly realized it had been at least a week since I’d heard that sound or remembered what that felt like.

See, ever since I finished the story in GTA4, I’d sorta been half-heartedly trying to get to 100%, but it’s a time-consuming process even if you are giving it your all, and I’ve got a long ways to go on pretty much everything I need to do. So aside from finally figuring out what I was doing wrong on the “Fly the helicopter under the bridges” Achievement, and somehow beating the CUBED high score, it had been many, many hours since I’d unlocked any Achievements. Add to that my time spent on my PS3 – Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds is pretty addictive, and I also decided to download Crash Bandicoot 2, just because – and you can see why getting a little over 100 points in just over an hour in LIJ would feel like a shock to the system.

As for LIJ itself: I gotta say, I’m really enjoying it so far, maybe even more than the Star Wars games. Maybe it’s because I’ve always secretly liked the IJ movies more than the SW movies; maybe it’s because I think the puzzles are better, and are a more natural fit with the source material; maybe it’s because watching Lego Indiana drop kick a “Nazi” is always endearing and awesome. The humor is just as spot-on as it’s ever been in this series, but they also do a pretty great job with the platforming (such as it is) – there are moments where this kinda feels like a Tomb Raider game, which is great considering what Tomb Raider games are emulating in the first place.

My rented copies of Ninja Gaiden 2 and GRID should be arriving any day now, and I must admit I’m not really looking forward to either of them. The previous Ninja Gaiden game utterly broke my spirit, and everyone’s saying that the camera in NG2 is even worse than the first one. And the word about GRID – about how the 360 version suffers from freezing – is very disappointing, as I am a huge fan of DIRT and was really looking forward to this (although, of course, since I haven’t actually played it yet, I have no idea how bad the problem is, or if it even exists at all).

And then MGS4 arrives next week. I’ve set up my Gamefly queue so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get a copy immediately; and yet I kinda don’t give a shit. I’m playing it because as a PS3 owner I feel obligated to play it, and so that I’ll be adequately prepared when the first wave of discussion hits the ‘tubes, but… as soon as I hit a cutscene that goes past 10 minutes and I lose track of whatever the fuck is supposed to be going on, I’m gonna sink back into my couch and wonder why I let myself get talked into something I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy.

>GTA4 wrap-up (spoilers)

>Finished the story mode in GTA4 over the weekend. Should’ve written down my stats; off the top of my head, at the time I finished the story, I was a little over 66% complete, and had put in around 37 hours. I suspect I’ll keep playing for a bit longer; I don’t think I’ll ever bother with getting 100%, but certainly there’s lots of Achievements left, and ultimately I’m not quite ready to say goodbye to Niko and Liberty City just yet. Right now I’m doing the Assassin missions and Brucie’s races, while keeping an eye out for pigeons and stunt jumps.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I chose to kill Playboy X and keep Dwayne alive; I chose to kill Francis and keep the older junkie brother alive (can’t remember his name); I chose to keep Darko alive, which surprised me a great deal (it should be said, though, that my controller has glitched out a lot in GTA4, and Niko ends up walking around in circles a lot when I’m not actually doing anything with the controller, and I think Niko glitched out and walked away while I was making up my mind).

But at the very end of the game, I chose to kill Dmitri, rather than do a deal with him. That felt satisfying. Then, of course, Pegorino had to fuck everything up, and the very final mission in the game was the first and only time where GTA4 fell apart for me.

The mission starts out with a long and somewhat aimless chase sequence – but it’s not terribly difficult or unusual, or even particularly fast. Then there’s a medium-length shoot-out, which can be made much quicker and easier with some strategically thrown grenades. But then there’s a motorcycle chase on a beach, which IS unusual being that you’re given the shittiest motorcycle in the game, and you’re driving on incredibly wonky terrain, and THEN you’re flying a helicopter that you’ve never flown before, with guns that you’ve never fired which makes controlling it that much more difficult, and the guy you’re chasing starts firing rockets at you, which you didn’t know he had, and – at least when I played it – you’re SUPPOSED to get hit with one, which triggers the final scene. I fucked up the mission from the motorcycle sequence on about 5 or 6 times, and when you replay a failed mission you’re stuck with the same stats as you had when the mission ended, so you’re dealing with less ammo and less health; basically, it fucking sucked and I hated it because all my 37 hours of playtime left me thoroughly unprepared for the last 3 minutes of gameplay. /end rant

I’m curious to see how much longer I can stay engaged in the endgame, although certainly the multiplayer is reason enough to keep the disc in the tray. I played San Andreas for months after I finished it, and I think GTA4 is a vast improvement over San Andreas.

I love the ambiguity of the ending. Unlike the previous games, there’s no triumphant scene, no winner-takes-all montage; Niko is a man in pain, still, and his life is as unsettled as it ever was. I could definitely see his story extending to at least one more sequel, or for as many as Rockstar would want to make for this generation of consoles; he is arguably the most compelling player character in the history of videogames and his story would appear to be far from over. He is a criminal with a conscience; a compassionate but cold-blooded killer; he is a human being, riddled with doubts and yet focused on the task at hand. I think it’s telling that GTA4 is the first time the player has been offered the opportunity to actually make choices; Niko’s really the first character they’ve created where you, the player, can actually feel the emotional weight of those choices, as those choices must weigh against Niko.

In any event, it’s a masterpiece, even if that last mission sucked. It’s a staggering achievement on a multitude of levels, and Rockstar has raised the bar yet again. I have absolutely no idea how they will top it, but if their previous track record is any guide, they most certainly will.

>GTA4: stats recap

>Tomorrow, May 5, will mark the first day I’ve had to go to work since GTA4 was released; I thought I’d put up a brief selection of GTA4-related stats before I turn in for the night. I’ll do a fuller recap tomorrow.

  • 51.07% game completion
  • 26 hours, 14 minutes, 17 seconds
  • 51 days (in game)
  • 67 missions passed
  • 6 deaths
  • 410 people killed
  • $430,812 on hand (the vast majority of which came from the Three Leaf Clover mission)
  • Favorite radio station: Liberty Rock (I’m guessing this is tabulated by in-car airtime; in terms of the actual music, my favorite stations are Fusion and IF99; for what it’s worth, I didn’t bother checking to see what the game says my least favorite station is, as I know it’s the hardcore station)
  • 9 pigeons
  • 3 jumps
  • 11 Achievements, worth 95 points

>A quick and dirty defense

>I saw a movie recently; it started out with 2 thugs slicing up a prostitute, featured multiple brutal beatings, and ended with a massive bloodbath, including the murder of the town sheriff. Was this movie considered pornographic? Was there a massive outcry? Were pundits up in arms, talking about how sick and depraved Hollywood was?

Actually, the movie was “Unforgiven”, and won 4 Oscars.

When I’ve surfaced every few hours from GTA4 to check my real-life RSS feeds, I’ve noticed that my “Games” folder has been filled – and not just from Gamepolitics.com – with story after story about people getting all bent out of shape about GTA4 – it’s a murder simulator, it glorifies violence, it – well, let them say it:

The glorification of killing of any police officer is just wrong. I mean, it desensitizes people to the real mayhem that’s going on out on the streets, and we already have a real problem with people not valuing human life.

People don’t seem to have a problem turning guns on cops, and this game — I know it’s just a game, but people sometimes have trouble separating reality from fantasy.

* * *

There’s a new world of entertainment here… But what does it contain? In this case, [protagonist Niko Bellic] kills, maims, has sex, then kills and maims some more, while also stealing various forms of transportation…

What “Grand Theft Auto IV” affirms is the pleasure of eschewing decency for obnoxious violence…

And, of course, there’s always the “you can have sex with prostitutes and then kill them to get your money back” line… These kinds of arguments are infuriating, because they fail to address what the game is actually about. It’s an easy thing to say; it’s similar to how the mainstream media always gets annoyed with bloggers and immediately invalidates anything a blogger says because “they’re unwashed and live in their parents’ basement.”

>It has begun

>I’m not sure I know how many hours I’ve put into GTA4 today. I ended up waiting in the midnight line last night; got my copy at around 1:00 or so; ended up going to bed around 3:30. Started playing again this morning at 10:00, and have been pretty much going straight through until now, 5:30pm, with a few breaks in between…

I’m so tired and incoherent. I feel slightly hungover, even though I’ve been totally sober throughout this whole process. Actually, it’s more like: I feel like I haven’t blinked all day.

So I’m not really in any position to discuss the game. I can say that I’ve surprised myself by mostly adhering to the main story and side missions; I haven’t really done any adventuring (I guess I’m saving that for when I unlock Manhattan). I’ve gone on a few dates; I’ve shot some pool; I’ve not gotten drunk yet. I’ve killed people, both accidentally and on purpose; I’ve also finally discovered what this game’s “hidden package” is, and it’s a little weird. Appropriate, but weird.

I suspect I’m speaking into the void, now, anyway – you’re all either already playing it, or you’re waiting to get home to start playing it. (Or, you’re not playing it at all, in which case: why not?)

>The Weight of Waiting

>

I am compelled to keep blogging in this space – even more so than on my other, “real-life” blog – because the wait for GTA4 is turning into an all-consuming hunger. I’ve already taken time off from work for it (even though I have a legitimate and necessary reason for doing so that has nothing at all to do with it), and every time my RSS reader dings, I become inexplicably giddy at the thought of getting new GTA4-related information.

And so today I’m trying to figure out what other soon-to-be-released games I can recall getting this bent out of shape over. This list isn’t necessarily reflective of my all-time favorite games (although certainly most of these would make the list); this is simply a list of the games that I absolutely could not wait for any longer.

1. On the 360, there’s been a lot of big titles to get excited for – and believe me, I’ve been foaming at the mouth for most of them, especially Mass Effect – but I guess I’d have to put Oblivion at the top of my list, which was a surprise to me even while it was happening:

I’m not even sure I myself knew how much I was looking forward to Oblivion; certainly I got really caught up in the hype over the last few months; I pre-ordered the Collector’s Edition, I sucked up every available preview and direct-feed morsel I could find; I even watched some of Gamespot’s 12-hour playtest, which I had originally dismissed as being the most retarded idea I’d ever heard. Here’s the funny part – I bought Morrowind – twice, for both PC and Xbox – but while I really appreciated the concept, I never got further than reaching the first quest-related town of Balmora before I lost interest. Between the two platforms I probably put in a total of 8 hours. Why, then, was Oblivion such a coveted purchase? Why was I so deeply enamored with a sequel to a game I’d hardly put any effort into? Was I a sucker for PR? I don’t even own an HDTV, so it’s not like my inner graphics-whore/crack-addict was going to receive that sort of gratification…

2. On the Xbox, I was tempted to say it’s the GTA Double Pack and/or Fable (I was also excited for KOTOR, but not to the same extent, even if its become one of my all-time favorites), but I think it has to be Psychonauts, which had been first announced in 2002 and was one of my primary reasons for buying an Xbox in the first place (along with the Oddworld games, which, sadly, weren’t all they could have been). That Psychonauts managed to still be awesome under the weight of years of expectations is a remarkable achievement, even if the Meat Circus ended up driving me (and many others) totally batshit insane.

3. On the PC… well, to be honest, it’s been quite a long time since my PC was my primary gaming center, and I can’t recall being amped up for a game that I knew I was only going to be playing on my PC. I did get excited for Neverwinter Nights, I guess, but that wasn’t an all-encompassing hunger. And I’m not afraid to admit that I’ve been looking forward for Duke Nukem Forever for, well, forever – and when they finally get around to releasing DukeNukem 3D for XBLA, I will DEFINITELY be going crazy for it.

After that… well, I’m not sure. When I was a little kid with an Atari 2600, I really can’t recall getting excited about new releases, because (a) there was no internet, (b) since my parents bought the games for me, I had no choice in the matter as to what to get excited about. If anything, I would get excited to get games that other friends of mine already had. Same thing with my brother’s Sega Genesis, which I never bought games for, either. But by the same token, we could play all those old games OVER and OVER and OVER again – we didn’t necessarily need anything new when we could keep having fun with what we already had. (Boy, I miss those days!)

So, what about you? What games have you been unable to sit still for?

>Bully for you, bully for me

>Was home sick yesterday, which sucked on a multitude of levels – aside from just feeling like crap all day, it was also the first bona fide beautiful day of the year, and all I could do to celebrate was to open my living room window a smidge.

I did get some gaming time in, though, because, well, that’s what I do when I’m home sick. And since all I can think about these days is the impending release of GTA4, I spent most of the day playing Rockstar games.

I even put aside God of War on my PSP to get into GTA: Liberty City Stories, and it must be said that while the game itself is definitely showing its age, it’s still a pretty remarkable feeling to be playing a fully fleshed-out GTA game on a handheld, especially when it arguably looks better than the original PS2 version.

The vast majority of yesterday, though, was spent getting back into Bully, a game I’d put down a few weeks ago and, for whatever reason, never got around to picking back up. Basically played through all of Chapter 3 and am now a few missions into Chapter 4; I’ve finished all my morning classes and I think I only have 2 Shop classes and 2 Photography classes left; I’ve found all 6 transistor radios and as a result I’m almost unstoppable in a fight, even against 5 or 6 jocks. There’s a pleasant mix of missions now; some are a little harder than others, but most of them can be beaten in one go. At first I wasn’t sure how much of a completist I was aiming to be, but I’ve all but abandoned the idea of getting 100% now; I’ll get all the rubber bands, gnomes and G&G cards (now that I’ve got the maps) and that’ll probably be the extent of it.

One mission cracked me up, and then also kinda made me cringe: Photography 3, I think it was. The mission: go to the seedy part of town (New Coventry) and take 5 pictures of “hobos or dogs”. If anybody wants to know why Rockstar’s sandbox games “work” on a level that other GTA clones don’t, this has to be Exhibit A. Let me pull back the layers on this one:

  • Photography 1 was taking pictures of flags; Photography 2 was (if I remember correctly) taking portraits of classmates. But the idea of having high school students actively seeking out and taking pictures of homeless people as a class assignment – especially when the pictures themselves are graded on how crazy and decrepit the people are – is a spot-on impression of every stereotypically pretentious art student out there, and BOY OH BOY did this remind me of people I knew in high school.
  • But then, when I got to New Coventry, it took me a while to find the hobos, because the seediness of the town ends up making everyone look a little shady and suspicious, and suddenly I found myself making off-the-cuff judgments of character of everybody I rode past.
  • And then, when you do find the crazy people – or, at least, you take enough pictures of random people and suddenly one of them gets marked as a successful photograph – you now recognize what you’re looking for, but the fact that the mission is timed lends a degree of urgency to the mission, because suddenly the mission isn’t about documenting the plight of the homeless and the poignancy of the human condition – it’s about making sure you snap a picture with enough time to get back to class.

Now, not all of Bully’s missions have this many levels of subtext to them – in fact, I’m not necessarily sure that this particular mission was intended to be read with this level of detail, especially since all classes are optional – but goddamn, this one (a) cracked me up and (b) made me a little bit uncomfortable. I guess I should be grateful that the graphics are so last-gen, because doing this mission in an Unreal 3.0 world might have made it somehow less subversive than it ended up being.

Still hoping to have it finished before the 29th, because after that I’m toast. I was thinking about liveblogging my GTA4 experience; as it happens, when GTA4 comes out, my wife will be home recovering from a surgery and I’m taking vacation time to take care of her, and her office is giving her a laptop so that she can work from home; she may or may not still be taking painkillers that week, but I doubt she’ll be working, at any rate, so the possibility exists that I could play and type at the same time.

There’s also a part of my brain that says: “Fuck that. I want to play GTA4, not document the experience of playing it.” And you can’t get immersed in a world when you’re constantly pulling yourself out of the experience.

Maybe I’ll just keep a tape recorder handy.

>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.

>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.