Shouts From The Couch

>What I Played This Weekend: “Oh right, I own a Wii” edition

>I’ve said this before, but in the context of this particular post it bears repeating – there once was a time when my hunger for a Wii was all-consuming. My heart and wallet may have belonged to Microsoft, but I yearned for something more; I ached to waggle. And, most importantly, I wanted to get my wife interested in gaming – or, at least, gaming with me. She was never going to get into Halo or Portal, but at least we could play tennis or bowling for a little while.

The irony, of course, is that once the novelty of the Wii’s control scheme wore off, the crushing disappointment started to sink in. There were no games to look forward to, at least to someone in my demographic; Nintendo saw their revenue streams coming in from non-gamers and you can hardly fault them for trying to make money, especially in this shitty economy. That said, my enthusiasm for the Wii didn’t drop off as much as it entirely evaporated, and I know I’m not the only one – when people came over to my apartment for birthday parties and other such gatherings, we would always pull out Rock Band instead of Wii Sports. It is true that my wife and I had started to use the Wii again in recent months, but only as a goddamned exercise machine. This was not my beautiful game console.

So why the hell did I buy Wii Sports Resort yesterday? Why did I succumb to Nintendo’s charms, again? Why did I enable Nintendo to continue to ignore me?

I can’t really answer that without offering at least one rationalization: I didn’t actually spend any cash in order to get it. I traded in my PSP and all 7 PSP games I owned specifically so that it could be a cashless transaction. Because as disappointed as I’d been in the Wii, I was even more disappointed in the PSP, and there was even less to look forward to on that platform.

Anyway. Wii Sports Resort is what Wii Sports should’ve been. It’s yet another collection of mini-games, in both single- and multi-player configurations, and the big difference in this collection is that the Wii Remote’s new add-on makes the Remote… more sensitive? It’s hard to explain what’s different about the Motion Plus controller add-on thing until you try the frisbee mini-game. Suffice it to say, it is as close to throwing an actual frisbee as one can get. Similarly, the ping-pong mini-game is remarkable, especially in terms of how you can throw different kinds of spin on your returns. I was as big a fan of Rockstar’s Table Tennis as anyone, but I must admit that the ping-pong game in WSR is arguably more engaging.

The rest of the mini-games are pretty hit or miss. Archery is certainly interesting; the sword-fighting game is fun but not particularly deep; bowling feels pretty much identical to the previous iteration, and golf is actually much harder now that the remote is more sensitive to wrist positioning. I suspect that I’ll play this just as long as my wife remains interested, and then that’ll probably be it.

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As long as the Wii was powered up, though, I figured it would maybe be a good time to get back into Super Mario Galaxy. I had been enjoying it thoroughly at first, but got hung up after getting my 15th star or so; then I tried to go back to the earlier levels to stock up on some easy 1-ups, and found that the game (smartly?) makes that prospect a bit trickier than I’d anticipated. In any event, I got past whatever it was that had gotten me stuck before, and now I guess I’m back in it. I’m up to 21 stars now, and I’m continually impressed with each new world’s mechanics. I suppose it could be argued that if the Wii produced nothing of value except SMG, it would still be worth a purchase. It could also be argued that the first half of the previous sentence is actually, literally true.

>What I Played This Weekend: "Oh right, I own a Wii" edition

So why the hell did I buy Wii Sports Resort yesterday? Why did I succumb to Nintendo’s charms, again? Why did I enable Nintendo to continue to ignore me?

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>The Beatles: Rock Band – set list guess, reconsidered

>Here’s my original guess at the Beatles: Rock Band set list, from February.

She Loves You
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
Love Me Do
Help!
I Saw Her Standing There
Please Please Me
A Hard Day’s Night
Can’t Buy Me Love
Eight Days a Week
Ticket To Ride
Yesterday
I Feel Fine
Paperback Writer
Rain
We Can Work It Out
Revolution
Get Back
Drive My Car
The Word
In My Life
Taxman
She Said, She Said
And Your Bird Can Sing
Doctor Robert
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
Getting Better
Good Morning Good Morning
A Day In the Life
Hello Goodbye
Strawberry Fields Forever
All You Need Is Love
Back in the U.S.S.R.
While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Birthday
Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey
Helter Skelter
Come Together
Something
Octopus’s Garden
Here Comes The Sun
Mean Mr. Mustard -> Polythene Pam -> She Came In Through The Bathroom Window -> Golden Slumbers -> Carry That Weight -> The End
Get Back
Dig a Pony
I’ve Got A Feeling
The Ballad of John and Yoko

It was noted in the comments to that post that I’d included “Get Back” twice, so that was dumb. And I knew, at the time, that “Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me and My Monkey” was never going to get in – I don’t even necessarily like that song. But I had my iPod with me when I was making this list, and I was scrolling through my Beatles albums, and it occurred to me that the instrumental tracks for that song would be pretty fun to play – each instrument is doing something interesting.

Anyway, I bring this up because 25 of the game’s 45 songs have been confirmed by EA. As Kotaku reported this morning, those songs (with appropriate “nailed it” / “missed it” commentary) are:

“Back in the U.S.S.R.” [yes]
“Can’t Buy Me Love” [yes]
“Day Tripper” [how did I miss this?]
“Eight Days a Week” [yes]
“Get Back” [yes, twice]
“Here Comes the Sun” yes
“I Am the Walrus” [I left this out on purpose, b/c I had no idea how they’d do it. this is one of my favorite Beatles songs!]
“I Feel Fine” [yes]
“I Saw Her Standing There” [yes]
“I Want to Hold Your Hand” [yes]
“Octopus’s Garden” [yes]
“Paperback Writer” [yes]
“Revolution” [yes]
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” [yes]
“Taxman” [yes]
“Twist and Shout” [didn’t guess this, for some reason – but I’m not crazy about their early, pre-Rubber Soul stuff]
“Within You Without You” [didn’t think this would make it since it’s so unconventional, but they are using the drumbeat from Tomorrow Never Knows, which is awesome
“Yellow Submarine” i’d guessed there’d only be one Ringo song]
“With A Little Help From My Friends” [so i definitely didn’t think there’d be 3 Ringo songs]
“Birthday” [yes]
“I Got a Feeling” [yes]
“Dig a Pony” [yes]
“Do You Want To Know A Secret” [not even sure I’ve heard this song before]
“I Wanna Be Your Man” [see #23]
“And Your Bird Can Sing” [yes]

I’m already off by 6, but I’ll take it. If they can include “I Am The Walrus”, they can do anything. In any event, this is moot – at E3, Harmonix revealed that the entire catalog would eventually be available to download, starting with all of “Abbey Road.”

Can’t. Fucking. Wait.

>Everything Old is New Again: Uncharted

>I’m resurrecting the “Everything Old is New Again” feature, and we’re changing the ground rules a little bit. As you no doubt surely recall, EOiNA was originally intended to be an ongoing series wherein we’d play classic games for the first time, and I started it off with a few entries regarding my very first playthrough of Final Fantasy 7. As it happens, I got stuck about 10 hours into the game (couldn’t seem to get a chocobo, iirc), and then my 360 got back from the repair shop, and I returned my borrowed copy of FF7 to its rightful owner. (As FF7 is now available on the PSN, and my save files still work, I do expect to return to it at some point.)

That said, I’m resurrecting EOiNA because I’ve been (re)playing Uncharted for the last few days, and as it happens, I’ve got quite a few things I’ve gotta say about it. But let me set the scene first:

1. The wife and I have recently gotten sucked into Firefly, which we recently Netflix’d. We’d caught Serenity on some movie channel a little while ago and liked it very much and figured we ought to give the series a shot. And so while it’s true that Captain Malcolm Reynolds has quite a bit in common with, say, Han Solo, he also bears more than a passing resemblance to good old Nathan Drake. So much so, in fact, that I double-checked Nathan Fillion’s IMDB page to make sure he wasn’t Drake’s voice-actor. (I do not remember him being in Jade Empire, and I played that game twice.)

2. I haven’t really done that much gaming on the ol’ PS3 these days. Yes, I recently finished (and enjoyed) InFamous, but aside from the very occasional Trash Panic session, there really just hasn’t been all that much to do. So I’ve been feeling neglectful.

3. Going into E3 this year, I had most of my attention squarely focused on a few selected titles, specifically Mass Effect 2, Brutal Legend, and The Beatles: Rock Band. (My affection for the original notwithstanding, my hopes were not very high for Bioshock 2, and that hasn’t changed much.) And sure, the new Splinter Cell footage was pretty encouraging, and Assassin’s Creed 2 turned a lot of heads. But when all was said and done, I came away from E3 2009 with Uncharted 2 at the very top of my wishlist. Even without the multiplayer, which I probably won’t play very much of anyway, the single-player footage looked absolutely amazing, and reminded me of how much I enjoyed the first one.

And so here we are, in the doldrums of the summer release calendar. A perfect opportunity to revisit the original Uncharted, one of the brightest spots in the PS3’s launch.

For the most part, the game is still excellent. The graphics are still lush and colorful, the environments are nicely varied, the platforming controls are still tight and intuitive, the pacing is just right, the story is engaging and remarkably well-written, with one of the better all-around voice cast ensemble performances of this (or any) generation…

…And, of course, the enemies are still relentless and bulletproof. For what at first glance appeared to be a prettied-up Tomb Raider clone, the game’s ratio of combat-to-platforming is about 80:20, and it can get wearying at times, even on the Easy difficulty setting. You can pepper an enemy in the upper torso 3 or 4 times and they’ll simply stagger about – headshots are the only way to really keep a guy down, and even then they don’t always work. This was my single biggest complaint the first time around, and it hasn’t changed this time, either – it’s not uncommon to feel like you must be doing something wrong, that the rest of the game is so incredibly polished and so it must be that you’re not shooting the bad guys in the head hard enough. It’s great that the enemies are smart – they flank you and throw grenades and considering that you’re heavily outnumbered, it’s not a surprise that you die so often. I just wish the weapons felt a bit more powerful.

I wish I could say that it’s worth a 2nd playthrough for the Trophies, but I don’t really give a shit about the PS3’s Trophy system. It’s nice that I’m getting them, I guess, but the PS3’s Trophy system is arcane and impossible to quantify. It’s an added bonus if you care about it; I do not. It’s to the game’s immense credit, though, that it does not matter one bit.

>And back again

>Really? It’s been almost 2 weeks since the last SFTC post? Damn. I can’t speak for Gred, but I’ve been pretty busy lately doing non-game-related things, and I’m feeling a bit guilty for neglecting this little corner of the internet. So let me get caught up:

1. Finished Ghostbusters on the 360. It is a rare example of a licensed property that takes full advantage of its license, which makes the game better than it actually is. Because let’s be honest here – without the Ghostbusters license, and the full participation of the original cast, and the input of Dan Akroyd and Harold Ramis on the script (however limited that participation may have been), the game is seriously flawed, and would probably fly under the radar. The actual act of trapping ghosts is pretty complex and involved, and I’m not sure I ever fully got the hang of it – getting a ghost in the trap felt more like a nice bit of luck than skill. More to the point, though, the Ghostbusters themselves are remarkably frail and fragile, and near the end of the game I found myself spending far more time playing medic than wrangling ghosts. The penultimate boss fight in particular was absurd in this regard – it was literally impossible for me to make any progress against the boss because at any given time, 1-3 Ghostbusters were incapacitated, and the remaning Ghostbuster wouldn’t go over and help me revive them. These are the friggin’ GHOSTBUSTERS, goddammit! Why are they so helpless? Why am I, the rookie, seemingly invulnerable?

That aside, I felt compelled to finish the game – the script is pretty good, actually, and the voice cast does a great job. (It’s a shame, then, that the lip syncing is maybe the worst I’ve ever seen.) And I must admit that the first time I got to run around Ghostbusters HQ, I had a huge dorky smile on my face, and I never got tired of exploring, even if there wasn’t a lot to explore. Getting to use all the official equipment is a thrill, too – putting on the goggles and following the PKE meter never got old. And it should be noted that the proton packs look remarkable.

2. I traded in a bunch of games yesterday for Tiger Woods 10, which I almost immediately regret. I played a little bit of the career mode last night, and the second career challenge asked me to “match Tiger Woods, shot for shot”. I’ve played for literally 5 minutes and my stats are incredibly shitty, but let’s leave that aside because this particular challenge wants me to mimic Tiger’s performance. Not to beat it, but to ape it. I say this because Tiger’s first shot on this particular hole lands at the outer fringe of the green, and when I took my first shot I actually got the ball within a few yards of the whole. AND THUS, I FAILED THE CHALLENGE. The game actually wanted me to hit a bad shot, like Tiger did, so that I could then sink a monsterously long putt, like Tiger did. I don’t want to hit a bad shot, ever. And when I’m only at my second challenge, my stats are horrendously bad – I couldn’t hit a 30-foot putt if it was straight, flat, and funneled directly into the hole. What a completely ridiculous idea. I’m actually pretty good at the Tiger Woods games, I’d like to think – I’ve certainly put hundreds of hours into the franchise over the last 8 years or so – and I’ve never seen anything so stupid and totally misguided as this particular challenge.

It’s too soon for me to comment on the rest of the game – I haven’t seen the much-talked-about rain feature, which I really don’t care about anyway, and the game on the whole doesn’t seem that much different from last year’s iteration, which I thought was pretty good. So it’s probably going to be an effective time-suck for the summer months, which is all I want. I’m just a little annoyed at how stupid the career mode seems to be – if the rest of it is spent trying to be Tiger, instead of just trying to be me, that’s going to be pretty dumb.

3. After hearing the Giant Bomb guys talk about it for a few consecutive podcasts, I felt compelled to download Trash Panic for the PS3. It’s an odd game, to be sure, and definitely more difficult than it ought to be, and yet there’s something compelling about it. I need to spend more than 10 minutes with it, although I’m not sure the game changes that radically the farther you get in. For 5 bucks, though, you could do a lot worse.

>InFamous / Prototype

>Plowed through the end of InFamous last week; that game is a blast. A little simplistic, though, to be sure, and more than a bit repetitive – for all the initial comparisons I’d made to Crackdown, it really feels more like Assassin’s Creed than anything else – but very well made; the story was more than a bit convoluted but it was told well enough, and while the big twist didn’t exactly drop my jaw the way that, say, KOTOR did, it certainly makes the inevitable sequel seem a lot more wide open in terms of what Sucker Punch can do. I’ll happily give it an A-.

And speaking of games featuring regular dudes who suddenly gain superpowers and can run all over the place in big open cities, I played the first 15 minutes of Prototype last night and that was more than enough. I didn’t necessarily have high hopes for it, but I certainly went into it with an open mind; the opening cutscenes are certainly really well done. But once the game started, it all fell apart. The controls are unintuitive, the camera floats around all over the place, and the game actually starts with you in the middle of a fight without (a) telling you what you’re fighting and (b) telling you what you can actually do. It does gradually give you hints as to how to do things, but then – in classic, ridiculous fashion – the opening battle suddenly stops, and then you’re taken to a point 18 days in the past, when all the powers you just learned don’t actually exist yet. So stupid.

At some point I’m going to try out the 2nd Boom Blox game, which is sitting in an unopened Gamefly enevelope next to my TV.

>Wolverine / InFamous

>I would love to go and cover E3 one day, but the truth is that I’m not as good a writer as I imagine myself to be, and I’m feeling a bit too old (33 isn’t that old, but still) to suddenly switch gears and go back to school and then try to get work as a games journalist, especially in this economy. Case in point – I was re-reading my keynote column from the other day, and it felt a little familiar, and some quick checking revealed that I basically rewrote the introduction to last year’s E308 keynote column. This was not willful plagiarism; this was just me being a bad writer. So I apologize, and I embrace my sad destiny, which means that instead of being in Los Angeles for a crazy week of over-stimulation and sweatiness, I get to stay home and play games.

I did not finish Wolverine; my 3rd attempt at beating the final boss ended in frustration, cursing and sending the damned thing back to Gamefly. But Wolverine isn’t necessarily a bad game; I’d say it’s better than the movie, although that’s not saying much. Wolverine’s main problem is that in terms of storytelling, it simply assumes that you’ve seen the movie and the Xmen trilogy, and so you shuttle off from place to place without really knowing why, and there were more than a few times when I had absolutely no idea who I was talking to. Exhibit A – if you hadn’t seen the movie, you would have no idea who Deadpool actually was, because Deadpool’s original identity isn’t even mentioned until you’re in the middle of the first fight. But whatever. You don’t play a movie tie-in for the story, and the game spends most of its time throwing you into insane amounts of incredibly bloody combat (which is a feature missing from the movie). To its credit, the combat is satisfying, but also incredibly repetitive – waves and waves of baddies continually flood in, almost to the point where you could argue the game is padding its length – and the only times you get a break are either when you’re suddenly thrown into an arbitrary block-pushing puzzle, or when you’re watching a cutscene that feels totally taken out of context.

Even with all this, I was still kinda enjoying my time with it – at least there weren’t any moral choices to make – but then I got to the final boss. Wolverine’s boss fights suffer from this incredibly annoying and lazy problem where, when you’ve knocked a boss’s health bar all the way down to zero, they aren’t actually dead – they suddenly come back to full health and become even harder to beat. This is a stupid, stupid cliche and I’ve always hated it, and the final fight against Deadpool is especially egregious. You actually fight Deadpool at least 3 times – maybe there’s another round, but I gave up. As I said before, I kept dying during the 3rd go-round, because Deadpool basically cheats. The fight takes place atop a nuclear reactor, and I’d been able to get up close and throw Deadpool off the side at least a dozen times, but he’d just glitch back to the top – it’s true that Deadpool can teleport, but when he does he’s enveloped in a pink-ish cloud, which (tellingly) was not the case when he’d magically come back to the top of the reactor. Whatever. The game is good with Achievements, which is why I was playing it in the first place.

InFamous, on the other hand, is a quality game from top to bottom. Comparisons to Crackdown are valid – open-world superhero parkour games aren’t necessarily a dime a dozen – but it has its own unique spin and is incredibly engaging. Last night I finished all the missions on the first album and started messing around on the second. The missions, both side and story, are nicely varied, and while they do start to repeat themselves they don’t necessarily feel repetitive. The game does beat you over the head a little bit with the now-obligatory moral choices, but I’ve been being the good guy and it’s not hard to stay on that path. I’m certainly curious to see what the bad-guy powers are like, however, and I suspect that I’ll be giving InFamous another spin during the next slow release period.

>E309: Keynote Wars

>It used to be easy for me to follow E3. For starters, my use of the internet was far more streamlined – I’d just point my browser at Gamespot all day and take in as much as I could without getting fired from my job. More to the point, I’d put a laser-like focus on what Microsoft was announcing while dismissing – nay, mocking – Sony and Nintendo’s efforts without a second thought.

But it’s a bit more complicated now. I’m sounding like a broken record by this point, I know, but I have a personal, vested interest in pretty much everything that’s happening at E3 this year, and pretty much every game journalist has a twitter account which appears to be jacked into their cerebral cortexes so that every single thought and vision gets tweeted, and my RSS feed pretty much exploded yesterday with almost 800 stories coming through. I feel more shellshocked than anything else. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to process all the information that’s coming in; I get a chance to look at videos here and there and that’s really about it.

That said, I did follow along with Kotaku’s liveblogs for each of the major press conferences, because I had to.

Microsoft probably had the most solid performance this year. Certainly they had the most star-studded, even if most of the celebrity appearances felt a bit unnecessary – but then again, this is E3, and if you’re going to go for it, you gotta go for it. Not a lot of jaw-dropping announcements or surprises, save for two that kinda got glossed over (at the time) – Crackdown 2 and Left 4 Dead 2. The footage I saw of Halo: ODST looked frighteningly so-so, although I’m not really that big a Halo fan so what do I know. The Beatles: Rock Band looks fantastic, and even though there’s no way I’m getting them the new instruments look amazing, especially Paul’s bass. Alan Wake looks promising, although I guess I was expecting something a bit more stunning, considering the lengthy development time. And I must admit I’m a little excited for Forza 3, even though I’ve never really gotten that far into the previous 2 iterations. It’s hard for me to get excited about Project Natal in its current state – I need to see it in context. The Lionhead demo looked too scripted, although I must admit I was stunned by the business with the water.

Nintendo’s press conference wasn’t nearly the disaster it was last year, but that’s not really saying a hell of a lot. Kotaku’s liveblog reported that they started off the keynote by saying that one of Nintendo’s missions is to “create surprise”, which (ironically) is precisely why I feel like the Wii is like a novelty item. The first time you play with it, it’s exciting and interesting and, yes, surprising, but once that wears off you realize you’re playing shitty games with shitty presentation and it ends up collecting dust. I couldn’t care less about Wii Fit Plus or Wii Remote Plus – I’m wouldn’t play Wii Sports Resort for more than 10 minutes, and the whole premise behind the Remote Plus pretty much makes me feel like the original Wii Remote was under-designed. And don’t even get me started on the Vitality Sensor. When all is said and done, though, there were some decent game announcements – Super Mario Galaxy 2 is something I’ll be looking forward to, and I’m definitely excited for Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story for the DS. I’m not that excited for the new 2D Super Mario Bros., nor am I particularly excited for the new Metroid.

To be honest, I was probably most excited for Sony’s press conference. The 360 might be my console of choice and the place where I play anything multi-platform, but Sony’s exclusive titles are nothing to sneeze at. From what I’ve seen thus far, Uncharted 2 is probably my game of the show; the brief video of single-player they showed looked absolutely amazing. And I’m definitely going to be looking forward to God of War 3 and The Last Guardian, and I’m certainly intrigued by Rockstar’s PS3 exclusive Agent, even though they didn’t actually show anything. The PSP Go seems awfully unnecessary to me – the real problem with the platform isn’t the design, but the lack of compelling content – and so it was nice to see some PSP game announcements (like LBP, MotorStorm, Gran Turismo). I was especially excited to see that Final Fantasy VII would be appearing in the PSN store (I was led to believe that it would be online last night; alas, I couldn’t find it). The only real problem with Sony’s press conference was that most of what they showed wouldn’t be available until 2010.

So that’s that. As for the rest of the show, please stay tuned – there’s going to be some new and (hopefully) interesting content here at SFTC over the next few days, with some special guest commentators.

>EA Sports Active and the death of Wii Fit / more Sacred 2

>It’s no secret that I’ve been incredibly disappointed with the Wii, although it’s understandable if this comes as a surprise – I almost never think about it, so I almost never talk about it. It took me almost a year after its release before I was able to get my hands on one, and then, after the initial rush of Super Mario Galaxy wore off, I hardly touched it because there really wasn’t anything that compelling to play on it. Eventually I started to accept that as a 33-year-old male hard-core gamer, I was no longer anywhere near Nintendo’s target demographic.

Except that as a 33-year-old male hard-core gamer, I’m a bit out of shape. And I knew that if I was going to get up off the couch, I was probably going to need to trick myself into doing it. So I bought Wii Fit a couple weeks ago, with my wife’s blessing, and we’ve been using it for the past month.

To be perfectly honest, I wasn’t really ever fully convinced of Wii Fit’s ability to get me to lose weight and get in shape, and the results spoke for themselves – after 3 or 4 weeks, I hadn’t lost any weight. Frankly, it was rare if I even broke a sweat. The boxing and hula-hoop “exercises” were the only activities that seemed to raise my heart rate, but they got awfully repetitive (and the sound/music in the boxing activity is just plain awful). And the lack of structure makes it hard for someone like me to stay motivated; it’s too easy to slack.

So when the reviews started trickling in for EA Sports Active, I took notice. And this morning, I finished my first workout.

Wow.

Yes, I broke a sweat. Yes, I worked my ass off. I feel like I burned more calories during this morning’s 20-minute session than I did for the entire month I used Wii Fit. The workouts are structured, guided, varied, engaging, and – most importantly – fun. My only real complaint is with the little leg strap that you use to store the nunchuck – it kept sliding off my shorts, and eventually I had to strap it on to my bare thigh. Other than that, though, it looks to be exactly what I needed to get back in shape – I’m very happy I picked it up.

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Actually had some substantial game time this weekend, for what felt like the first time in ages. Spent a short time with the InFamous PS3 demo, and I’m definitely looking forward to it; spent an even shorter amount of time with the Tiger Woods 10 demo, which doesn’t really seem all that different from the 09 iteration (with the notable exception of in-game scoring, which is a nice touch). Still, a PGA season in Tiger is a nice way to fill in idle hours during the summer.

But most of my time was spent trawling through Sacred 2. I’m now halfway between level 34 and 35; I probably should have written down my stats before writing this up, but I can at least say that I got the achievement for finishing 40% of the side quests (I think that’s the achievement that helped me break 44,000) and I’m probably pretty close to getting the Junior Cartographer achievement (see 30% of the map).

I said last time that the voice acting was horrible, and it eventually became so bad that I ended up turing the sound all the way down. This doesn’t dramatically affect gameplay, however – I’ve put in 15-20 hours by now and I couldn’t possibly tell you what’s going on or why I’m doing what I’m doing. I don’t really care, either. To paraphrase Private Joker in “Full Metal Jacket”, I’m enjoying meeting interesting and stimulating people of an ancient culture… and killing them. The environments have indeed become more varied – they’re a bit obvious (swamp, desert, jungle, underground/volcano, etc.) but it still makes for a refreshing change of pace. There are weird glitches from time to time, but nothing game-breaking. The biggest bummer that’s affected my experience is the loot management – my carrying capacity is rather small, and because there’s no way to stop time in the game, it can be difficult to clear out inventory space without getting jacked by dudes.

So, again – I can’t really come right out and recommend it; compared to stuff like Mass Effect and Fallout and Oblivion, it’s not even in the same league. But it’s also kinda nice to not have to make any moral choices; it’s refreshing to simply focus on button mashing and keeping your inventory stocked with good equipment. If you can tolerate that kind of experience, you’ll probably enjoy your time with Sacred 2.

>The Lair of Evil

>
This post is a few days old already (which means it’s ancient history) but it’s a very fascinating read about architecture in videogames – specifically, where the bad guys live.

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