Cogswell Cog

Gears of War 2 is made of Win, lots of blood, and just a hint of cheese.

Picture this, if you will.  You’ve just plugged a man in the chest with your shotgun, but he’s not quite dead, he’s crawling around on the ground, desperately pleading for a friend to rescue him.  You then casually walk up to him, hold your trusty shotgun by the barrel, and take a swing at his head.  Just like Tiger Woods would do.

Plus, there is just something both visceral and gratifying about sawing a man in half from his crotch to his face with a chainsaw/gun thing.

Altered Beast

[Instert 16bit lightning strike and explosion here]

So I’m back from the MMO dead.  Luckily, only a couple months of my life lost on this one.

As is customary, my website tends to suffer the most from these distractions, because why would I want to waste time here when I could be grinding for phat loots?!  Unfortunately for Warhammer Online, the loots were lacking phat and the grinding kicked in way too soon.  Back to farming my Xbox for achievements…

Maybe a post or two thrown in here just to keep the place on it’s toes.  Speaking of toes, if this place has them, would they be webbed?  [Badoom-cha]  Thank you, I’ll be here all week, try the veal.

John Madden

So today is the big day.  Madden ’09 arrives.  Incorrect cover and all.  Yay.

It should be noted, that I despise the Madden football games.

Madden hasn’t been good since Madden ’92 on the Sega Genesis.  When number 35 for the Bears (Neil Anderson) was unstoppable and number 84 for Kansas City (Willie Davis) was the fastest receiver in the game.  My friend Joe and I played ridiculous amounts of that game.  Then the ’93 version came out, and while it wasn’t horrible, it wasn’t as good as it’s predecessor.

I hadn’t played a Madden game again until the ’03 release on the original Xbox.  Unfortunately, at that time I already had a taste of the football glory that was the 2K series.  The 2K3 game blew Madden (and Microsoft’s own football attempt) out of the water.  The animation was better, the gameplay was better, and the presentation was better.  Madden was simply living off it’s reputation.

The 2K series would later become the ESPN series, but continued to be the superior game despite the fact that Madden continued to be the most popular.  With ESPN 2K5 however, they decided to price the game to a point that even the die hard Madden fanboy’s couldn’t resist, $19.95 vs the standard game cost of $49.99.  That game would be the last great football game ever made.  Following that season, EA signed an exclusive contract with the NFL which allowed Madden to be the only game with actual NFL players and teams.

Since then, Madden has been putting out what equates to Madden ’03 with newer rosters.  As opposed to the new rosters the games could update to anyway.  Awesome.

Yeah, I’m an Achievement whore.  I guess it’s the RPG geek in me.  Achievements are like quests or gear or gold and they can be just as addictive to obtain as any other phat lewtz.  The competitive side of me is a sucker for em as well.  What better way of determining whom is better than whom than with arbitrary numbers?

Despite the brilliance of the Achievement concept, some developers appear to put as much thought into their implementation as someone who’s trying to write their name on the ground with their own feces.  Here is my attempt at enlightening those responsible for these fecal accidents:

• Time spent != challenging.  I’m all for Achievements that are so frustrating to complete that you end up despising every moment you are working for them.  *cough* Little Rocket Man.  *cough* Mile High Club.  At least once you finally earn them, you feel you actually accomplished something few others could.  However, Achievements that are “difficult” only because they require some ridiculous amount time to “achieve” only serve to quantify how sad our gaming lives really are.  We don’t need that.

• Single player achievements should be possible to complete in one play through.  Multiple playthrough’s to find some odd, hidden item in a level is one thing.  Multiple playthrough’s because you have to complete the game on each difficulty level, independently, is another.  Yes, Devil May Cry, you may lick my balls.

• Take it easy on multiplayer Achievements.  If you have the remote inkling that your game is teh suck, don’t penalize the random person who picks up the game a year or two down the road only to find he’s the only one playing it online.  The time spent complaint also applies here to a number of online Achievements.  Gears of War + 10,000 online kills = seriously?

• Don’t outsmart your own game.  If you’re gonna hide shit throughout a level, don’t allow a player to accidentally progress to the next area while at the same time locking them out of the previous area.  Punishing people for a lack of clairvoyance only serves to grant them the clairvoyance to avoid your future games.  Kung Fu Panda, you’re kung fu is weak.

I could probably go on forever here, but then I might convince myself that these Achievements are even more pointless than I already know they are, so I’ll just leave it at these last few thoughts.  Well implimented Achievements can add value to the worst of games just as bad Achievements can add frustration to the best of games.  If you are going to err, err on the side of less suck.  No one will hate your game because the Achievements were too easy.

Diamond Dave

Due to artistic differences, me and my Rock Band band have been forced to part ways.  I wanted to take the Rock Band band into strange new directions while they just wanted to play Rock Band.  Since they were just dragging me down anyway, I’ve started my solo career.  I think there may have been a little bit of shenanigans going on anyway as they have now replaced me with my supervisor.

Or…the less amusing, reality based version of the story…

It just so happens that the Rock Band competition my department is holding has been scheduled right in the middle of my upcoming trip to Florida.  Not only am I now out of the running for the prizes, which we surely would have won.  I suppose I’m gonna have to break down, give Dave back his stuff, and buy my own copy of the game and equipment.

Sadface.

Bill Gates

That is, unless you are a Sony or Nintendo fanboy.  Since I don’t own either a wii or a PS3, that makes me an Xbox fanboy.  For those of you like me, the winner, it’s we.

The big 3 console vendors have each had their E3 moment in the sun and one thing was clear, Microsoft has deep pockets.  Nintendo had little, if any, things to shake a wii stick at.  Sony is trying hard to catch up to Xbox Live and boy, the PS2 is sure doing well.  Microsoft on the other hand, dropped all sorts of bombs.  Some of which probably caused Sony to drop some bombs as well.  Mostly of the F variety.

The first shot was the news of previously exclusive PlayStation developer Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII coming to the Xbox.  Not really sure if I care much about that since I’ve never played an FF game, but it’s still a huge blow to Sony.  If MS would get their heads out of their asses and release a Blu Ray addon for the Xbox they would crush the PS3 for good.

The second shot was the official announcement of the Netflix streaming movie collection becoming available through the Xbox to Netflix subscribers.  While the news itself is something that’s been rumored for awhile, it was also something most expected to see on both platforms.  The news here is that it appears to be an Xbox exclusive deal.

The third big Xbox announcement was the news of a dashboard update and this new avatar concept.  From what I’ve seen so far, they can keep em.  I’ll take the current blade system and my gamerpic.  The proposed new interface looks underwhelmingly uninspired and the avatars look like bad mi clones.

Overall, I’m still glad I have an Xbox, even despite it’s hardware deficiencies (when compared to a PS3).  Hopefully some worthwhile game news will continue to come out of E3 the rest of the week.  Meanwhile, the Bungie countdown continues to work towards 7/16/08 07:07:07 GMT.  Please be something other than Halo 4…

[Update] Bah.  The Bungie reveal was squashed by Microsoft.

Air Guitar

It’s probably a bad thing if, when you are driving down the road, you see the painted lines and your mind is trying to figure out how to play them on a Rock Band guitar.  Not quite as bad, but equally sad, as when any song you hear is now being broken down into various green, red, yellow, blue ( + orange if you’re leet) color combination’s.

Hi, my name is Brian and I’m a Rock Band addict.

What do you call it when you are doing air guitar of a Rock Band guitar?  Besides the obvious things like sad, pathetic, or a cry for help?

On a mostly unrelated, although probably eventually related when more Rock Band 2 info comes out, note.  If you are a gaming freak like myself, but just came out of cryogenic stasis, E3 is this week.  For the unaware, E3 is like a week long Christmas for gamers.  Except instead of presents you get information about things which may or may not ever come out.  OK, bad analogy.  Think of something awesome.  Now trust me when I say E3 is like whatever it is you just thought about.

Hopefully E3 will help remove the sadface I’ll be having once I return Rock Band to my friend Dave on Monday.

Hair Metal

I love my job.  We are having a Rock Band, Battle of the Bands competition at this years departmental meeting thing.  The winning band gets $100 for each member and the copy of Rock Band used for the competition + the instruments.  Sadly, the winning band will probably split up shortly after the competition due to fighting over who actually gets the game portion of the prize, since there is only one copy.

I had never actually played the game before, but luckily a room in our office has been turned into the Rock Band Studio for people to come and practice or whatever.  Our band has been holding “band practice” every day at lunch, as well as various other times of the day.  It took me a whole one song to realize that this game shizzles my nizzle.

In the highly probable event that I’ve improperly used the phrase, “shizzle my nizzle”, then substitute that with “pwns me like something that pwns things”.  I don’t know what the hell it is that’s so good about the game, but it probably has something to do with the fact that you feel like you’re Jack Black in Tenacious D.  You probably look like an idiot to anyone who’s looking, but you are melting faces none the less.

The downside.  My friend Dave was kind enough to let me borrow his game and equipment over the weekend.  As a result, my daughter was up till midnight with me while we took our band on a world tour.  She is on lead vocals while I am shredding guitar.  After she went to bed I stayed up for another 3 hours rocking my solo tour, playing some 30+ songs.  My son then woke me up 4 hours later so he could play “Wock Band”.

On top of that, my pal Carpal Tunnel called and said he’d be over on Sunday.

Lies

Took the kids to see WALL•E this weekend and while it is a good film, though a tad too slow to keep it’s target audience fully interested, the opening short was excellent.

As is customary of every Pixar movie, they open with an animated short film. This one was called Presto. To sum up, it is about a magician who has two hats with a magical connection that allows objects to pass through one to the other. Through these hats, and with the assistance of his rabbit, he performs his magic.

If the creators of Presto ever come out and state that the game Portal was an influence, I wouldn’t be surprised. If they ever claim the opposite, much like the cake, they will be full of lies. The short plays out just like I’d envision a movie based on the Portal technology would with limitless applications of the Portal’s portalness. Because it is a short, the film’s concept never becomes tired and leaves you wishing it would keep going, much like it’s gamesake.

In other Portal related news. Someone has actually created a Portal inspired, custom voice file for specific models of Garmin GPS’s. GLaGPS

Lego my Lego Eggo

As a child, I loved me some Lego.  I played with those things all the damned time.  With a huge container full of miscellaneous parts you could build anything you wanted.  The only limit was your imagination, how many pieces you had, and if you happened to have a crowbar and blow torch to separate those flat pieces that would seem to bond on a molecular level if you ever stuck two of them together.

As time went by the Lego folks started cheating.  They started making sets with pre-fab pieces.  Entire castle walls already assembled.  All you had to do was place them in the correct location to build your castle, but make no mistake, that’s all you could do with em, because who would want to build a spaceship with stone wall looking pieces.  Now, if you wanted to build a spaceship or car or house, you had to convince your parents to buy you the sets with those pre-fab pieces.  The Lego world I had grown up with had died.  I imagine you will eventually have completely built objects that just have the Lego name and Lego bumps on them.  No assembly required.

Skip ahead a few years.  I can’t tell you why someone thought Lego + Star Wars made sense, but if I could meet George Lucas I would punch him in the face.  As it has since spawned fake-Lego Spiderman, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and countless other Lego bastardizations.  To make it worse, these wouldn’t just be Lego toys, there would be video games.  When I was younger I would have just built Lego crap for my action figures to play in, but that required imagination and the kids of today aren’t allowed to have that anymore, the fun has to be given to them in a way that keeps them from fucking it all up.

With all that out of the way, we can come to the world of today.

I have just received the Lego Indiana Jones game in the mail.  I got the game for my kids because they have become huge Indy fans thanks to all the recent showings of the original, aka good, movies in preparation for George Lucas destroying yet another piece of my childhood.  Anyway.  The game is utter crap and reminded me exactly why I hated the Lego Star Wars demo I had tried out.  Hunting around a world for hidden pieces of Lego bits so you can build Lego junk to get your Lego incarnations of movie characters through the Lego version of the movie it’s based on.  You know how the story is going to progress because you’ve already seen the movies.  There is no dialogue, just cutesy Lego animations.  There are endless villains that attack you while you are trying to figure out the puzzles for no other reason than to annoy the piss out of you because for all the damage they are doing to your character, he will just immediate respawn right where he fell.  Oh yeah, there is no fun.

My kids, they love it.  Just like they loved Indy 4 and think Jar Jar is funny.