>Into the SD void

>’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.

>Back To The Apocalypse

>I find it hard to believe that it’s really December 19. The year was already moving pretty fast, and now I look up and see that Christmas is next fucking week. What the hell happened?

In any event, the release calendar madness has finally slowed down, and now I find myself with a bunch of titles that I finally have some time to enjoy.

First and foremost, I’m getting back into Fallout 3. I had put it down a few weeks ago for some reason, and when I heard about the forthcoming packages of DLC – one of which would raise the level cap and make the endgame a bit more productive – I felt like my time with the game would be better spent with all that stuff intact, instead of playing it now, finishing it, and then coming back later. (I had originally meant to talk about this very thing in relation to this particular article from MTV Multiplayer.) And I guess there’s a part of me that still does feel that way; I’d like to be able to seamlessly incorporate this new DLC into my Fallout experience. That said, last night I found myself with an empty apartment and a lot of options, and I found myself missing the Fallout experience.

Goddamn, that game is awesome. I believe I said in my 2008 wrap-up that I thought I might be a little intimidated by it; it’s such a huge world and there’s so much to do and I still haven’t totally figured out how good or evil I want to be, even though I’m level 10 and have put in a considerable amount of hours into it already. I put it in last night and it only took me about 30 seconds to remember how it worked and I was immediately hooked, again. I’m trying to stay away from the main quest, and as a result I’ve found a ton of other things to see and explore. I used to do this thing in Oblivion – if I was walking towards my targeted location, and another random, undiscovered location started to appear in my map, I’d always feel compelled to stray away just far enough to see what it was that I’d found, and I find myself doing the same thing here in Fallout. And it’s really incredible to see what Bethesda has crammed in there. I’m currently on a side mission that’s taken me to some pretty awesome locations, and the level of detail in every room is just staggering, and it boggles my mind to think that if I had only made a left turn in Rivet City instead of a right, I would never have seen any of it. And the thing of it is, I’m already well aware that there’s a ton of stuff that I’ve already missed because I went one way and not the other. Absolutely incredible.

Rock Band 2 continues to be a nightly source of amusement at my house; my wife has finally graduated to “Medium” difficulty on guitar, and we’re getting back into Tour mode again. I made a brief mention of this in the 2008 Year In Music post on my other blog; there’s 2 songs in particular that I found in the store that I’ve totally fallen in love with, and I ended up purchasing those songs in iTunes – Maximo Park’s “Girls Who Play Guitars” and Silversun Pickups’ “Lazy Eye.” They’re both fun as hell to play on drums, but they also just kick a lot of ass in general.

I made a special category in my 2008 Year in Games post so as to congratulate myself for not being a total whore and buying the Strongbad Games, even though I’m a big fan of the cartoon and an even bigger fan of point-and-click adventure games. Then, of course, it was announced just the other day that they were releasing all 5 adventures on Steam, and so OF COURSE I went and downloaded them immediately. Steam was acting a little weird last night, though, and I couldn’t actually open Episode 1. But I did check out the tutorial in Episode 5, just to make sure I knew what I was getting into, and of course I’m totally fucking hooked.

I finally beat the single-player campaign in Little Big Planet, and then I started dabbling in user-created levels, most of which are kinda shitty. (It does sound strange to use the phrase “single-player campaign” for a game like LBP, but to borrow a phrase from Donald Rumsfeld, you use the nomenclature you have.) I’m not sure I’m ready to begin designing my own levels just yet; I may end up going back into the single-player to try and find all the stickers and objects that I didn’t get the first time. I gotta say – even though the controls are awfully floaty and the back-middle-front aspect of it can get terribly screwed up, that game’s charm is absolutely impossible to deny. I am fully on board the Sackboy bandwagon.

Finally, my DS is finally starting to come to life again. I’ve been getting into Chrono Trigger a little more, and I’ve also been enjoying the newest Castlevania game. I find it incredible that Konami has basically been making the same Castlevania game for a million years and yet it still ends up being pretty awesome every single time.

And so what are you playing this weekend?

>VG Symposium

>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

>The 2008 VGAs

>Do I really want to do this?

I guess I’m doing it.

It’s 9:25pm EST on Sunday, December 14, 2008, and the VGAs have been on for almost a half hour, and I guess I’m gonna watch it. I’m trying to watch it; I would estimate that about 90% of the TV time has been either commercials, product placements, or LL Cool J. I don’t even know what awards are being given out or who’s nominated.

Herewith: some random ramblings as the bullshit unfolds.

…When Mike Tyson came out on stage, I’m pretty sure everybody in the theater got a little queasy.

…Is it me, or did the very brief look of in-game footage in that God of War 3 trailer look a little… early?

…They gotta stop with these skits.

…The “best independent game” nominees are all amazing; I was fortunate enough to play all of them and I’m very glad to seem them all getting their due. I was not aware of any of them being fueled by Dew, though; that’s good to know. That technical difficulty snafu announcing World of Goo was a little scary.

…I really wish I didn’t have to be embarrassed about watching this show. It’s clear that Spike is really trying to make this award mean something, and I’ll admit that having all these major announcements during the show is a pretty convincing incentive for me to stick it out. But the writing is terrible and the emphasis is everywhere but on the actual game designers, which is unfortunate. I’d be very curious to see what Spike anticipates the target demo for this awards show to be; I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that it doesn’t include me.

…It’s 9:41 and they’ve only announced 2 awards… now they’re giving Kiefer Sutherland an award, and now the All-American Douchebags are playing, for no apparent reason. Are they afraid that the people who watch this show will be bored if they actually showed some games winning awards?

…At this rate, I’m probably turning this off after they do the Brutal Legend video, and I can’t help but feel like that’ll be the last thing they show. Why excatly did they ask Jack Black to host this thing? We’re almost an hour into the show and he’s been on stage for about 5 minutes.

…EA is doing Dante’s Inferno? Really? That could almost be interesting; the brief glimpses of gameplay made it look like a cross between God of War and Dead Space, and that’s actually kind of awesome.

…Will Wright deserves better than that intro. (Nice shout out to Tim Schafer, though! W00t!)

…GTA4 DLC preview… That was a pretty bitchin’ trailer. It basically looks like a shorter campaign; I wonder if it loads seperately from the main game. What happens to Niko after you start this DLC? Do you never see him again? If you start as the biker, is the city different?

…I’m so glad to hear that the famous celebrities who got paid enough to show up for this thing “really love videogames.” That makes me feel like these are that much more authentic.

…Best RPG: I’m gonna guess Fallout 3. And I WAS RIGHT. Will they show any video of the upcoming DLC? No.

…Busta Rhymes? OH BOY OH BOY OH BOY. You’re right, Busta – I do hate it when I see a trailer and it turns out to be bullshitty. Uncharted 2 trailer: OK, that was fucking amazing. I am officially on board for Uncharted 2. Also: I think the confetti machine is borked.

…Terminator Salvation gets a big fat meh.

…Mafia 2‘s music is HORRIBLE. I’m pretty sure those string patches were out of date in 1987. The game itself looks like Martin Scorcese directing GTA.

…Tony Hawk again? 50 Cent? Why?

…Watchmen: Alan Moore weeps.

…Weezer announces for best music game, and I’m gonna guess it’s Rock Band 2… although Wii Music looks hott.

…I do like how all the people who accept awards give nice, quick speeches.

…This Kevin James Mall Cop skit is kinda sad. Epsecially if he’s here to announce the award for Studio of the Year. I guess it’s official that these awards don’t mean anything. I have no idea what to guess for this: I’d vote for any of them. But good for Media Molecule. And I meant to say this earlier – why are the Best 360 and Best PS3 categories throw-aways?

….Wait wait wait, they’re doing a MONTAGE for the actual fucking awards? 96 minutes into a 2 hour show? What the fuck is this bullshit? Why did Shooter, RPG and Music Game get stage time and everybody else get shafted like this? Jesus fucking Christ. Brutal Legend had better be fucking awesome.

…From Joystiq’s live blog, which is reading very much like this one:

10:38PM Dear VGAs, until you pretend that these awards are important no one else is going to believe it.

10:37PM Now we blow through all the awards, because watching the actual awards is SOOO much less fun than watching Kevin James put human joy to death live on stage.

…Brutal Legend! At 10:44pm. Funny with the flamethrowing; let’s go and show it. SHOW IT. And it was shown. Can’t. Wait.

…Megan Fox announces Game of the Year? Oh I wonder if there’ll be another techincal snafu for this. The silver women in the background look exasperated.

My guess: GTA4. Looking back at all these games again, though, I am reminded just how amazing this year really was. Drumroll: I win. Why aren’t the Houser Bros accepting?

I think this final skit went completely off the rails.

Weezer brings the hot sauce. That applause sounds canned. I’m done.

Spike: you’re getting closer. But you’re still a long fucking way off.

>Just Because It’s Free Doesn’t Mean It Can’t Suck

>Penny Arcade’s Tycho says all that needs to be said about Home.

There’s one line in particular that really stands out:

There is already a growing school of Home apologetics, fostered by the same Order of Perpetual Masochists who lauded the rumble-free Sixaxis at launch and suggested, hilariously, that Lair and Heavenly Sword were videogames. They’re under the impression that because something is free, this places it on some golden dais beyond censure. It’s no virtue to give away something that no-one in their right mind would buy. They have no idea what this world is for, and that ambiguity infuses every simulated millimeter of it. (emphasis added)

There were similar debates going on over all over the place; I saw it first-hand in the comments to Giant Bomb’s article about Home’s impending release earlier this week, at least when I first went over there to check on what people were saying. Tons of fanboys were running to Home’s defense without having actually used it, and when people who had used it (like me) said that it’s pointless, they inevitably retorted “But it’s free! How can you complain about freebies that you never have to use?”

It’s very simple, actually. Home sucks. And I’m never going to use it. And the reason why I’m complaining about it is that I’d very much like to use my PS3 for something other than watching BluRays, and I was hoping that Home would be something cool and useful and offer an invaluable and unique experience that would enhance my enjoyment of both the Playstation and the games I play on it. Sony has been struggling in 3rd place for this entire generation and I’m sure many people were looking to Home as the thing that would help differentiate the PS3 from the 360. I guess, in a way, it has – it’s proven that Sony has absolutely no idea what they’re doing.

>Brutal Legend Update!

>EA is publishing Brutal Legend; will be released Fall 2009.

I’ve given EA a lot of shit over the years, but they turned it around in 2008; they worked with a lot of great developers and put out a ton of new, interesting and unique IP. (Of course, they’re getting killed financially as a result, because consumers are stupid.) And EA is well aware that they’re taking a bit of a risk here; Tim Schafer’s games, as we all know, have been critically lauded and have incredibly devoted fans, but almost none of them have ever been breakout hits.

Still – this is great news for Schafer fans, and now I can start setting up the template for the 2009 GOTYs.

>Scrabble, Rock Band, and some personal inventory

>Some quick hits:

1. I am somewhat of a Scrabble nerd. Which is not to say that I’m very good at it, but rather that I very much enjoy playing it. I was a huge Scrabulous fan on Facebook, and I’ve even succumbed and started playing the EA-sponsored OFFICIAL SCRABBLE Facebook app. Hell, me and Gred and our other friend Jongre started the BAD SCRABBLE HANDS page, which still gets quite a lot of traffic even if we haven’t updated it since 2001. I’ve had my eye on the upcoming US release of the DS Scrabble game, which has been out in the UK for a while – I very nearly bought a copy when I was in London earlier this year. (Or maybe it’s not the same thing?) Anyway, this story cracked my shit up.

2. Via the excellent Offworld comes this interview with Alex Rigopulos, the man behind Rock Band.

3. Just for shits and giggles, I scoured my old GS blog and found my year-end recaps for 2004, 2006 and 2007. I’m not entirely sure I know what happened to 2005.

>X-Play hearts Fable 2

>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…

>Who is Gred?

>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.

>Home

>If this Gamepolitics article is to be believed, Sony is officially releasing Home tomorrow. Sony previously had been rolling it out in larger and larger numbers, similar to what Microsoft did with the NXE; I somehow got into the beta a few weeks ago.

I’ve maybe checked it out once or twice since I initially installed it, and the experience hasn’t gotten better. It’s still unclear to me what exactly the experience is supposed to be. When I see Sony’s press releases, describing it as…

…a ground-breaking 3D social gaming community available on PS3 that allows users to interact, communicate and share gaming experiences…

…well, I guess that sounds interesting in theory, but in actual practice it’s useless. It’s certainly useless without a headset; the canned responses are not particularly robust, and that assumes that you’re interested in participating in a chat room with a bunch of teenagers. Maybe it’s better with the chatpad thing that’s coming out soon, but that’s not even the point. There’s no real need for a 3D social gaming community; it serves no practical purpose. The gaming community is a robust and diverse many-sided thing but the side that most people end up witnessing, whether in forums or in multiplayer matches, thrives on anonymity and calling each other assholes. You can’t get into virtual fistfights in Home, and you certainly can’t pwn someone in Home because there’s nothing to play other than a few crappy minigames that start to get boring about 20 seconds in.

You can look at advertising, though. And what the press release doesn’t tell you is that Home is slathered in advertising. There are game posters and game trailers all over the place, and I’m sure that non-game-specific branding will soon follow, if it’s not already there. Maybe you can buy a Mountain Dew T-shirt for your virtual dude and then meet up with your similarly-attired “friends” by the bowling alley and watch a trailer for SOCOM. Boy, that sounds like a great time. Meanwhile, I’ll be getting on with the rest of my life.