Category: Games

Top: Playstation 2
Bottom: Xbox 360

I was weak. :( But the zombies need to be stopped…

(Man, I need to dust.)

Titan Quest: It’s pretty much a direct clone of Diablo 2, but it does it well. The main differences are in the historic settings (Greece, Egypt, and China), and a dual-class skill system that allows a lot of different combinations. All it needs is an expansion pack to provide some more locations (perhaps some random dungeons too) and smooth out some rough spots, and some tweaks to the loot system to allow more upgrades and variety, and it’ll be a worthy successor to D2.

SiN Episodes: Emergence: I played this after HL2 and its latest episode, and SiN is a bit of a disappointment in comparison. The graphics are fine, but there’s not enough variety, there are too few ‘set piece’ battles, and the choice of weapons is weak (the shotgun in particular). I don’t think I’ll be buying the following episodes.

Yoshi’s Island (GBA): This is one of the few Mario games I hadn’t gotten around to playing yet. I think I was putting it off primarily because the focus wasn’t really on Mario, and because of the different, ‘kiddie’ visual style. It’s too bad I waited for so long, since it’s actually quite a good game. There’s lots of variety in the levels, and the boss fights are all uniquely different and challenging, unlike some other Mario games where they’re only slight variants.

Chronicles of Riddick: Games based on movie licenses usually suck, but occasionally there’s an exception, and this is one of them. It combines shooter, stealth, and adventure game aspects smoothly, and is one of the few FPSes with a decent hand-to-hand combat system.

A new physics engine + modern processing power + way too much time on someone’s hands = this.

Tourist Trophy (PS2) – It’s basically Gran Turismo 4, just with motorcycles instead of cars. Same tracks, same basic goals, and even pretty much the same user interface. It’s a bit less meaty though, with fewer vehicles, slightly fewer tracks, and fewer total race events. It’s still fun though, and handling a motorcycle is different enough from the cars in GT4 to be interesting.

Brain Age (DS) – Some simple puzzles and challenges that are supposed to help ‘exercise’ your brain. The actual benefit of doing so is dubious, but it’s still kinda fun in small doses, so it makes a good diversion in the morning before heading to work. Its handwriting recognition is a bit lacking though.

New Super Mario Bros. (DS) – It’s a throwback to the original 2D Super Mario games, blending elements of them together, adding a few new ones, and giving it modern graphics. As a fan of those originals, that’s just fine with me, and it’s been great fun so far. Looks like it might be short though, and it hasn’t been very tough yet.

ToCA Race Driver 3 (PC) – It’s great for the sheer wide variety of different types of racing it has, with everything from dirt track sprinters to F1 to stock cars to shifter karts. It doesn’t feel nearly as realistic as other games though, and you don’t really get to keep and upgrade cars as you go along, which is half the fun of these “carpgs”.

Taking a quick look at what we know of the “next-gen” consoles now:

XBox 360: The hardware seems fine, but there’s still not enough titles out for it that appeal to me to get my interest high enough yet. MS is now just being boring instead of evil…

PlayStation 3: A number of important things were just revealed at the E3 conference: 1) They’ve ditched the ‘boomerang’ and the controller’s back to the old PS2 form, but the rumble has been replaced with gyroscopes, 2) it’ll be split into two separate versions like the 360, with the cheaper one being rather pointless and non-upgradeable (no HDMI video, wireless, or memory cards) and 3) the price is obscene, with the upper end model probably ending up around $650-700 CDN. It’s all somewhat underwhelming, so far.

Revolution: Well, it’s not the Revolution anymore. Now Nintendo is calling it the Wii, and I don’t think I’ve stopped snickering since the announcement. A stupid name won’t affect its capabilities or how fun the games are, but it’s still slightly embarrassing. The hardware is still much weaker compared to the others, but speculation is that it’ll probably at least be far cheaper. It’s also unclear if it’ll have enough interesting titles, since my DS already satisfies my Daily Recommended Allowance of Mario, but it’s supposed to be backwards compatible with the Gamecube and emulate even older systems, for a bigger library at least.

More 30 second reviews.

Mario Kart DS (DS)

It’s the same old classic Mario Kart gameplay, but the DS version improves it by having loads of tracks (16 new ones plus 16 classic ones from previous versions), a lot of choices in characters and vehicles, and online play. There’s a wide variety of different layouts and obstacles among the tracks, too, so it’s never the same race twice.

It’s a little bit frustrating in that online competition often involves a ‘snaking’ technique that’s difficult to pull off — if your thumbs aren’t up to it, you’d better get used to second or third place. The blue shell item seems a bit unfair, too — it can knock you from the lead back into third place by nothing more than the sheer luck of the person who got it. It’s still fun just to try, though.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong (GBA)

I wasn’t sure whether the gameplay in this one would be more like Super Mario Brothers or the original Donkey Kongs, and surprisingly, it’s both and neither. It’s like DK in that it’s on a smaller scale, with a particular goal to reach and some familiar elements like the hammer, but it’s also more like SMB in how you can move and fight enemies, but it’s also more puzzle-based than either of them were.

It’s kind of fun, but also a little too easy (so far) and looks like it could be fairly short. (On the other hand, considering how many unfinished games I have lined up, a shorter one might not be so bad…)

Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time (DS)

It’s apparently more of the same of the previous game (M&L: Superstar Saga) on the GBA, but I didn’t play the first one so that’s fine with me. It’s great anyways, combining RPGish stats and items with some reflex-testing action in the combat screens and while moving around, all done in the Mario universe style.

Shadow Of The Colossus (PS2)

This is probably one of the best games I’ve played this year. It’s fairly simple — all you do is fight these giant creatures by climbing all over them and stabbing them in their weak spots, but each one presents a slightly different puzzle as to how you get to those spots or even how to get on them in the first place. Then, once you’re on, it’s fairly tense and exciting as you struggle to hold on and reach those spots without losing your grip and falling off. Add a tragic story, an excellent soundtrack, and a unique visual style, and you’ve got a great game.

Animal Crossing: Wild World (DS)

This is basically The Sims, but geared more towards the kiddie crowd. Fish, dig up fossils, visit your neighbours, plant trees and flowers, arrange furniture for better ‘feng shui’, expand your house, catch bugs, shop, construct constellations in the sky… The DS version adds online support, so you can visit each others’ towns, and some things will subtly spread from town to town. A constellation you draw might suddenly show up in a friend’s town, you can write messages in bottles and throw them in the ocean and they’ll wash up on the shore of someone else’s town, and there’s a cat that wanders between towns whose face you can redraw.

Despite its simplicity and kid-targetted cutesyness, it’s strangely addictive. There are a lot of little subtleties, and I find myself turning it on at least once per day just to see if there’s some new NPC visiting the town, if the other residents have sent me mail, what’s new in the shops…

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (PC)

The story is stupid and the cutscenes are eye-rollingly cheesy, but the important part is the driving, and NFS:MW does that extremely well. The cars control well, the city you drive around in is large and good-looking, and there’s a wide variety of different races and challenges to participate in. Best of all is when you get the attention of the cops and enter pursuit mode, where you try to rack up as many infractions, fines, and bounties as possible, avoid the ever-escalating police efforts (they’ll eventually pull out roadblocks, high-speed pursuit cruisers, spike strips, SUVs, helicopters…), and eventually ditch them and hide out until things cool down.

The only downsides are that the tuning options are a bit more limited compared to other games, and it’s fairly linear; once you’ve finished the storyline and challenge series, that’s it and there are no further free-form or random goals.

Civilization IV (PC)

Civ 3 had a bit of a lukewarm reception since it introduced some bad design choices (rampant corruption, killer unit stacks) that made it frustrating at times. Civ 4 fixes most of Civ 3’s problems while keeping the best parts of it (culture, expanding borders) and adding some interesting new elements (religion, Great Citizens, military unit skill specializations). It’s easily the best version of Civilization yet, finally knocking Civ 2 off that perch.

Its only faults so far are that you’re still vulnerable to getting screwed by not having certain critical resources in your territory, and some victory types are much harder to achieve than others. If you try to go for a Conquest victory, it takes so long to conquer neighbours that it’s likely one of the AI civilizations will hit a Cultural or Space Race victory first. If you really want to win certain ways, you pretty much have to disable all of the other victory types first.

Fable: The Lost Chapters (PC)

This was kind of fun in the sense that it was ‘comfortable’ — all of the familiar RPG elements are there and the combat is a little more action-oriented to keep things interesting. Still, the overall story was fairly bland and generic and a lot of the hyped-up features (choosing good or evil, wooing town residents, your character aging, etc.) were fairly shallow or meaningless in the end.

Well, I got home soon after the Diablo 2 ladder reset yesterday, played for the rest of the evening, and managed to complete Act 1 and reach level 16. Not too shabby.

Then I looked at the top of the ladder, and the highest person so far was already level 69. I didn’t even appear in the top 1000, with the very bottom of the list being level 24.

And I thought I was obsessed with D2…

Yesterday I finished off Psychonauts, which has been out for a few months and was getting good word-of-mouth, but I hadn’t had time for until recently.

It was worth the wait though. Its mechanics as a platformer are fairly standard, but it really shines in the art direction (some people consider it ‘ugly’, but it’s certainly distinctive), surreal and varied level design (the Milkman Conspiracy level is like a slice of idyllic suburbia warped by paranoia and has to be played to get the full effect), characters and dialogue, and the just overall quirky feel to it.

The only downsides are that it may be a bit too easy up until the last level, and then it becomes insanely difficult. There was one part that I must have had to retry at least 30-40 times before finally passing it, almost building to controller-smashing levels of frustration. You also need to collect an awful lot of items scattered around to gain levels, which may or may not be your thing.

In the end though, it was definitely worth the $30 I paid for the PC version. I’d be a bit more hesitant about the much-more-expensive console versions, so you might be better off renting it and finishing it over a weekend on those, or waiting for it to drop a bit. (It’s far better-looking and smoother on the PC anyways.)

Unfortunately, it looks like Psychonauts hasn’t sold very well so far, despite the excellent word-of-mouth going around, and the publisher is in trouble over it. It looks like some of the problems may be distribution-related, as it’s been somewhat difficult to find; the Future Shop I usually check hasn’t had any PC copies for quite a while and only occasionally has any PS2 copies. I had to go to EB Games, and even then, only one of three locations had any PC copies. It would be a shame to see it fail, as people often lament the lack of creativity in modern games and the emphasis on sequels in franchises…

Diablo 2 Ladder Reset

So long free time…

Blizzard surprised everyone this last week with the sudden announcement of a new Diablo 2 patch and its release shortly thereafter yesterday. Nothing too earthshattering, though the mechanics behind the new boss fights are at least intriguing. Still, it’s surprising that they’re doing anything new with it at all this late after its release.

So, will I succumb to the old addiction and slip back into D2’s icy clutches? Not…yet. The one thing they didn’t do with this patch was reset the ladder, as many people were expecting. The date of the next reset thus remains unknown, so I’m still a bit hesitant to start new ladder characters this late into the current season and risk not getting to play them for long before the next reset occurs.

But, eventually… Maybe they’re just letting the patch have a ‘shake-down’ period before resetting the ladder, and then there will be no escape. Diablo always seems to win out in the end…

It’s an overload of racing this weekend as I’ve got the TV tuned to Le Mans, the Playstation 2 is running Sarthe II in B-spec mode, and the US Grand Prix is coming up. (Edit: And it’s turning out to be quite the fiasco…)

Maybe I’ll put in some practice laps in GTR, too…

Last night I passed the magic 25% completion mark in Gran Turismo 4. Besides rewarding me with a nifty new Audi, that unlocks one of the restricted areas: the endurance races.
Continue reading “There Better Be Bathroom Breaks”

I appear to have lost my primary ladder characters in Diablo 2 for some reason.

Normally they expire after 90 days without being played, and I haven’t had much time to play it lately, so I’ve just been logging in every once in a while just to reset that expiry timer. I was cutting it close this time, but still within the limits — after logging in, each character displayed an “Expires in 5 days” warning below it.

Except that when I actually tried to select a character, a popup window declared “The character ‘Soandso’ has not been used in 3 months and has expired.” Way to keep your schedules straight, Blizzard.

Oh well. I generally don’t go back to older characters once a new ladder season starts anyways. The current season has been running for a while, so I don’t want to risk starting new characters only to have them cut short by a sudden ending of the season, so I’ll just wait until the start of the next ladder season before playing again.

It’s hard to compare the upcoming Nintendo console to the others since much is still unknown about it, but there was one announcement that caught a lot of attention: they say that you’ll be able to download and play *any* game Nintendo produced for all of their previous consoles, right back to the original NES.

That alone is very tempting. Emulators and ROMs are easy enough to get, but running them on your PC still doesn’t have quite the same nostalgic feel as running them on a proper console with appropriate controllers on your living room TV does. Of course, the danger is that it’s easy enough to fall behind on current games let alone find time to indulge that nostalgia, so it could wind up being one of those things bought and barely used…

And they *finally* got around to announcing more of their primary titles for the DS, and they look fairly impressive, so I may finally have a reason to pick one up after all.