Category: Games

37) Hijack a train, derail it, and set it on fire:

As if I didn’t have enough distractions already, I picked up one of the new slimmer PS2s yesterday and wow, this thing is *tiny*:

(That white blob is my way-overexposed hand.)

This is actually the first real console I’ve had since the original NES. I know the Xbox has technically better specs and graphics and so forth, but in the console world the raw performance specs have never really seemed to matter all that much. Video game history is littered with systems that were technically superior spec-wise, but still colossal failures. It’s more a matter of what titles there are to choose from and what style of games you enjoy, and the PS2 library will fit me better, I think.

And I also picked up a handful of games, of course. Gran Turismo 3, since I haven’t played a decent driving game since Pod. Katamari Damacy, which proves that the Japanese have been smoking something pretty potent lately. FFX and the first .hack to check out the current console RPG scene.

And of course, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Because life isn’t complete until you’ve beaten an enemy gang member to death with a giant purple dildo.

So instead of catching up on my reading, cleaning, socializing, or developing any other hobbies, what do I do all weekend? Play games, of course. Pseudo-reviews ahoy:
Continue reading “Wasting Time”

New, smaller PS2.

I’m tempted to pick one up when it comes out. It may be an older console now, but all of the infamous hardware problems have probably been worked out and there’s a large enough library to keep anyone busy for quite a while…

Today I finally finished Morrowind: Bloodmoon, and it was a lot like the previous expansion, Tribunal. More-of-the-same of Morrowind, but with better map, dungeon, and quest design. The new map was large enough that there was a lot of new stuff to see, but not so large that huge chunks of it were left unexplored, like the mainland. The only real complaints are that the story wasn’t all that interesting (Some Guys: “Ooooh, behold the prophecy…” *do stuff* “Yay, the prophecy is fulfilled!”), but it was still fun to work through it and there was an interesting diversion in overseeing the development of the Raven Rock colony.

Although there are still a bunch of unfinished quests, unexplored areas on the mainland, and zillions of player-created mods available, I think I’ll leave it off here. I’ve still got a lot of other games to finish off, and ending Morrowind here puts me -1.5 games closer to catching up.

Why -1.5? Because yesterday I went out and bought two more and an expansion pack (Thief 3, Beyond Divinity, and Simcity4: Rush Hour). Yes, I know, I’m horrible… I’m just lucky I didn’t cave in and pick up Doom 3 and City of Heroes, too…

Well I’ve finally managed to finish Knights Of The Old Republic and Morrowind: Tribunal and knocked them off the pile.

KotOR’s storyline might not be great literature, but it was still fun and well-executed. The underlying engine is hidden very well under a nice interface for better immersion, the graphics are great on the PC version, the voice acting was excellent, and so on. I’ll definitely be picking up KotOR2.

Tribunal was largely more-of-the-same of Morrowind, which is pretty much expected of an expansion pack, but it did get a few things right where the original game was a bit lacking. The challenge level was reasonable for a character nearing completion of the main quest, so it wasn’t just a cakewalk even if you had all the best items already. The ability to list quests in progress was also extremely welcome — all too often you’d be on multiple quests simultaneously but your progress on some of them would get buried dozens of pages back in the journal, making it hard to tell what you need to do next.

I think they also did a much better job of city and dungeon design in Tribunal. The original game has a ton of dungeons, which helps promote the feeling that you’re in a vast world open for exploration, but far too many of them were way too similar in layout and style, even along the main quest. In Tribunal they are for the most part more distinctive and sensibly laid out.

Now to finish off Icewind Dale and start Morrowind: Bloodmoon…

(though I’m tempted to just abandon IWD; the story is kind of dull, and for combat and such it’s just not as impressive post-BG2)

Digging through my pile of older CDs, I found my Flight Simulator 2000 discs. I popped it in and gave it another whirl and…now I remember why they should never, ever let me anywhere near the cockpit of a plane. Not even seated nearby, lest I infect the crew with Bad Piloting vibes.

I do miss the ‘old-school’ slightly-less-realistic combat flight sims like F-19 and ATF though. You didn’t have to be a perfect pilot, and it was still fun to fly around and just Blow Stuff Up. Unfortunately they don’t run or look so well on today’s machines, and modern flight sims seem to be a dying genre, and overly focused on realism. I’ve been out of touch with the genre though, so maybe there’s a recent gem hidden away somewhere…

Well, I was sitting around thinking to myself “Gee, what are you going to do with your copious free time now that the current project at work is wrapping up?” when I suddenly learned that the new Diablo II Ladder season has started. So much for all that free time…

I had put D2 on the back burner for a while partly due to a lack of time and partly because, despite the efforts of the 1.10 patch, the ladder realm had become tainted by hacks and dupes, and after a while there was also the lingering threat of the end-of-season ladder reset. No point in starting a ladder character if the ladder season’s going to end in a month…

Hopefully the hacking won’t be as bad this time around since there’s no new patch to introduce more holes (though it did still occur in 1.10, it was at least greatly reduced), and maybe I’ll actually get around to finishing off the Hell difficulty and completing the world event this season. There are also 23 new runewords, increasing the odds I’ll actually be able to complete one. There’s also some contest going on, though it’ll almost certainly be won by some bot-assisted 24-hour-playing kiddie…

Oh, and this time around I can connect with both my PC and iBook at the same time. No, I’m not dextrous enough to play both at the same time, but it will allow me to transfer items to ‘mule’ characters safely instead of the risky drop-on-the-ground-and-quickly-switch-characters-and-rejoin-the-game method, and having a second player in the game increases the amount of xp you get and the quantity of loot dropped, even if the second isn’t doing anything.

While wandering about looking for information, I discovered that there’s a PocketPC port of MAME, the arcade game emulator. Woohoo! It’s a little on the old side, not having been updated in over a year now, but that’s okay; being the old fogey that I am, I’m mainly interested in the older games that are already included in that version anyway.

The PocketPC seems almost ideal for MAME — it’s portable, so that gives me a lot of games in a fairly small package for travelling. The PocketPC screen is taller than it is wide, just like most arcade screens, for efficient space usage. It already has a directional pad and buttons built-in, so you don’t need a joystick (can’t attach one anyway) or clumsy on-screen emulation. And it should be powerful enough to run all those older games that I want.

Of course, nothing is ever perfect…

Problem #1: Space. The emulator itself takes up about 7 megs, plus the roms (another 11 megs for the ones I want). That’s a lot when you only have 36 megs of memory to begin with, which then has to be split into ‘storage’ and ‘program’ memory and is already filled with various bits of junk. It should run from a flash card, but then a bit of juggling is necessary.

Problem #2: The controls. Although most games only need the joystick and one or two buttons, other features want to be assigned keys too. Coin insert, Player 1 start, Player 2 start, Quit, 3rd fire button, config screen toggle, etc., and there just aren’t enough buttons to define them all. You can at least get something workable if you dump all the ones you don’t really need on a single button though.

Problem #3: The controls, again. Although this PocketPC has the directional pad and buttons, they’re not all that well suited to gaming. There isn’t much feedback to the pad and it’s not well-aligned with each direction, so you can push downwards but it’ll register as left instead, or nothing at all. The pad is fine for normal usage where you can be more precise in how you push it, but it’s not so good in the heat of gaming. The buttons on the other hand have an acceptable feel to them, but they’re placed too close together and to the pad. With one thumb on the pad and one on the buttons, they’re often bumping each other.

Also, pushing on the pad and the buttons tends to make the whole PocketPC ‘wiggle’ a bit, since you’re only pushing on one end of it and there’s nothing bracing the other end. Annoying.

Problem #4: Sound. Although you can enable sound in a lot of the games, doing so slows it down considerably, and then it starts to sound awful and choppy anyway. You may as well just keep the sound off.

Problem #5: Speed. Even with the sound off, a lot of the games don’t seem to run at full speed. Even some fairly simple games like Elevator Action and Arkanoid, which were fine on my old 200MHz Pentium, are a bit slow on this 400MHz PocketPC. This isn’t exactly a high-end model though, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s something like slow memory at fault here.

Problem #6: Stability. After a few minutes of play it often freezes up or crashes, requiring a hard reset. I’m not sure if it’s MAME itself or the PocketPC to blame here, but regardless it’s rather pointless if I can’t play for more than that at a time.

Problem #7: Battery life. Although this device claims a battery life of eight hours, I can barely get three hours out of it while playing music on it, and that’s with the backlight turned off. It’ll be even worse when playing games full-tilt.

So close and yet so far. It’s one of those things that *seems* like it should work beautifully, but gets ruined in the details…

Whew. Yesterday I finally finished Baldur’s Gate II: Throne of Bhaal, and it only took, um, a little over two years. Not playing continuously, of course. A little thing called EQ kept butting in and shoving BG2 onto the back burner…

It’s definitely a *long* game, though. Even with a walkthrough, to accelerate it and get it over and done with, it still took a few weeks.

Overall I liked it a fair bit. Although the main plot was linear, there were tons of little side quests to pursue at your own pace. The kits and new class types added a lot of flexibility in character generation and new tactics — I played a sorceror, and having to carefully choose which spells you want requires some serious thought about how you want to play, for example. There were a lot of nice little subtleties too, like intra-party chatter, some NPCs responding differently based on obscure little conditions, strongholds, both good and evil paths in a lot of places, multiple solutions to quests dependent on things like your wisdom or charisma, etc.

It definitely wasn’t as open-ended as something like Daggerfall, but it’s probably about as close as you can get and still keep a strong plot line and keep the quests from being too generic.

There was one thing that bugged me, though… (Spoilers:)
Continue reading “The Miniature Gigantic Space Hamster Retires”