It seems that Bioware is including same sex relationships in their popular Star Wars MMORPG in order to satisfy fans, but Family Research is up in arms over the issue.  I normally wouldn’t bother talking about something like this, I mean the title itself is already redundant.  What, you mean that one anti-gay religious organization with a misleadingly neutral sounding name is against gay people being in something?  What a shocker!

Things get interesting however when you take a look at Tony Perkins’ incredibly poor word choice during the broadcast.

“In a new Star Wars game, the greatest threat to the Empire may be homosexual activists.”

“It’s time to show companies who the force is really with.”

Wait, threat to the empire?  You mean the bad guys?  Did Family Research just imply that homosexuals are going to save the day from the tyranny of the evil empire lead by Sith and murderers?  Better yet, Perkins mentions the force in a manner that sounds like he’s encouraging people to stand up against that homosexual threat so that the empire can continue unchallenged.  Family Research is clearly being manipulated by a Dark Lord.  It all makes so much sense now!  How else could they be so filled with hate?

All joking aside, I can’t help but ask why the throngs of complaining parents bought their children a T rated game.  T for Teen.  If they’re already teenagers then I’m pretty sure their sensibilities aren’t going to be scarred by the knowledge that homosexuals exist.  If they’re younger then that then the most concerning factor to me is that they’re letting their nine year old play a massively multiplayer online RPG.  By definition this means they’ll be spending hundreds of hours with total strangers that average out to be over 30 years old.  That alone puts them at risk to being exposed to a whole lot more worrisome issues than catching “the gay.”

I’m sorry, I just can’t keep this joke running for any longer.  The above claims were actually made by Fox News, and are you really surprised?

Read the rest of this article over at TekGoblin.

The EuroGamer Expo 2011 is my first gaming expo I’ve ever been to.  I had already bought a ticket so I decided to go despite not feeling close to half-health or fitness.

Modern Warfare 3

The place was only sparsely populated in the morning, so I made a beeline for whatever would likely be heavily queued up later in the day. This seemed like the logical place to start.  At first glance it looks like Modern Warfare 2 and it feels almost the same. If it weren’t for an entirely new map layout and a big MW3 logo on the start screen I’d have probably mistaken it to be DLC. It’s a shame they decided not to include Multiplayer, seeing as the Call of Duty XP event in California showed that it was possible.  Maybe they just didn’t want to fight with Battlefield 3 which was just around the corner.

The demo that’s playable on the show floor contains only two levels of survival, which seems like a cross between Spec-Ops and Zombies. You are plonked in the middle of a map and have to fight wave after wave of enemies. Unlike the previous two modes you start off with a bit of armor which slowly diminishes as you take damage. Once it’s depleted you’ll be back to the standard health and regeneration system. The enemies aren’t zombies, but rather wield a weapon and run around actively searching for you. You are armed with nothing but a pistol at the start but this doesn’t seem like much of a challenge as you can kill an enemy, steal their weapon and then run around like a prat and keep getting more.

Each kill rewards you with money and if you accomplish challenges such as getting a certain amount of headshots or a chain of kills you can get bonuses. You also get bonuses at the end of each wave depending on accuracy, kills and speed. The money can be spent at any time at select drop boxes: a weapons box, an equipment box, and a perk box. These aren’t readily available and have to be unlocked one by one as you play through the waves; which I though was a dumb design idea. Between each wave you have 20 seconds to reload, rebuy, reset and recuperate before the next one comes your way, or you can press “jump” to immediately bring them on. Why that button? Because Activision never expect you to jump to climb up or through anything!

While the perk system and unlocks were quite fun to acquire, I couldn’t help wonder if only putting this for show was anti-climatic. It wasn’t the most challenging thing on the floor and doesn’t seem like something that’s completely new, original or game-changing. They might as well make a DLC add-on for Modern Warfare 2.

Battlefield 3

Oddly, an EA game is hotly tipped to finally beat out Call of Duty. Throughout the day Battlefield 3 had queues that took forty-five minutes to play a fifteen minute trial, whereas Modern Warfare 3 had barely a five-minute queue.

It’s quite hard to see why, other than an aggressive advertising strategy, it has become so popular. The demo showed us a standard “Rush” game mode – the attackers must destroy two objectives to continue on, and they lose if they exhaust all their reinforcements. Battlefield 3 was a full 24-player game that showcased multiplayer on PS3, Xbox 360 and PC.

Throughout the fifteen minutes of play and quite easy winning, I couldn’t spot a difference between this and Bad Company 2. Four classes, similar weapons, similar ranking, similar scoring, similar HUD, same game mode. I didn’t bother with Bad Company 2 except for the demo, but I couldn’t find much any part of this game that was an improvement from the last. And it wasn’t without its weird bugs which made the game unplayable at times. Nevertheless it was fun, although I’ll have to attribute that more to me doing well and our team winning than the game itself.

Dance Central 2

Sadly, there was only one outlet for Dance Central 2. Maybe Microsoft know it wouldn’t be as popular here as it was at E3. Nevertheless, not caring that people were watching I had a go.

The story tends to be the same with the second in a series of Harmonix games, such as Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero II. The second has more modes, is more accessible and a little more challenging. It seems that the calculation for how well you do a move is a little stricter, or maybe it had to do with the fact that I was dancing alone with thirty people watching me.

The training mode, aptly named Break-It-Down, is a lot more manageable than it was before.  It allows you to select moves you want to practice rather than having to go through the whole song, and unlike the previous iterati0n you can learn all the moves at your own pace rather than it forcing it to move on.  The pair mode works perfectly as long as you have enough space to avoid smacking each other. The freestyle section has also had an overhaul.  If you do a move highlighted in a freestyle section you score bonus points!

Dance Central 2 was one of the very few games I looked forward to and actually enjoyed, that is before my self-consciousness got the better of me.

Final Fantasy XIII-2

Due to the news that the main composer and producers from the FFXIII left, I didn’t have high hopes for FFXIII-2.

The biggest complaint about the first game was that it was too linear.  I didn’t mind, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t have its flaws in other places, too.  Instead of fixing what didn’t seem to work  in the last game, (such as the ridiculous amount of training you had to do, or the fact that it was tactically advantageous to Game Over so you can reset your paradigms) Square Enix added in a whole mess of crap which they thought was “cool”. Cinematic action sequences (which are really Quick Time Events) rarely ever work. From my own memory the only game that made QTEs work was Paper Mario. Actually the Mog Clock, is another interpretation of a Paper Mario mechanic; rather than being wild in the field enemies pop up with a clock. If you attack them with your sword in the field while the timer is in the green zone, then you start with a Preemptive Strike which grants you bonuses (although not exactly the same bonuses) at the start of battle. If the timer runs out, the enemy starts with bonuses.  If you just make contact with the enemy or hit them in the yellow zone then battle will take place on even ground. You can also run away if enemies pop up.

If you defeat a new creature with a high enough rating you capture the creature for future use in battle. You can have up to three at a time and each one has their own role so they essentially function as a new character. While they all share a HP gauge,  they each have a special bar that can be used to trigger an underwhelming special attack when filled.

The core gameplay hasn’t changed.  This is another one of those “look what we can do, look what you can do” over-the-top type games. I don’t doubt that people will be attracted to it.  I just find it hard to enjoy when I know it’s free roaming and has alternate endings, which should never work in a story-driven game.

Mario Kart 7

I’m not a big fan of the 3DS. While the changes are more substantial than previous versions of the DS, 3D is only useful for making your eyes sore and making sure the battery runs out faster.  I do like the Mario Kart series, however.  They are so simple and addictive, yet it still manage to add enough chaos to make any player go through a full range of emotions. I’m glad to say that MK7 is no different.

MK7 is a 3DS exclusive, but the 3D is still not necessary so it might as well be a DS game. In fact it’s still essentially Mario Kart DS, but now they have paragliding! I can spot a gimmick from a mile away, but much to my surprise paragliding is fun and challenging.  More importantly, it works! You glide automatically when you are airborne and can still control your car. Glide well and you can gain a hefty advantage, glide poorly and it would have been better if you had just made a landing. Whilst in the air you cannot pick up or use items, although you can still get hit by flying blue shells.

There are now also fully underwater levels, but in other levels you can somehow still drown.

Kid Icarus: Uprising

This is one of the games I wasn’t planning on seeing, but it perked my curiosity and I had a go at it.

Uprising is barely like the original Kid Icarus. You control Pit in three different stages, the first of which is a flying stage. While pit flies forward you can control him over two planes using the circular pad.  Shooting is done using the touch screen and the trigger, much like Metroid Prime: Echoes. It is an arcade style shooter and simple enough to get to grips with easily. The second stage has him running on the ground level and the final stage is a boss fight.

What annoys me about this game is that while all attention is paid to the top screen (again in 3D) there is stuff going on the bottom screen! It is mostly dialogue, but some of it is useful. How the heck am I supposed to pay attention to that while playing?!

Not much more needs to be said. The 3D is annoying but utilised well so I could see how far away enemies are when I’m shooting. I have high hopes for something I never expected to be enjoyable.

Burnout: Crash!

If you compared today’s Burnout with the original game you would think that they were two completely unrelated. Burnout Crash takes a mechanic of Burnout: Takedown and gives it its own game. The idea is to drive a car into an intersection, blow it up repeatedly and cause as much damage as possible. Scored are determined by the dollar value of destroyed objects.

That’s it. Not a particularly enticing description, but it was enjoyable and challenging enough to warrant more attention. It uses Kinect, but I found that to be pointless and just went ahead and used the controller.

The Gunstringer

A Kinect shooter that doesn’t use some gun peripheral?! The Gunstringer has already been released, but that didn’t stop me from trying it here. You control The Gunstringer, a puppet in a rogue theater wild west situation. I couldn’t quite make out what it was but that wasn’t the point.

Your left hand controls him like a string puppet. Swing it left or right to move him left of right and pull up to jump. Your right hand controls his shooting hand. How do you shoot without a trigger? You hover the aiming cursor over targets, then make a bicep curl to fire at the targets, all the while moving the Gunstringer out of the way of incoming bullets.

Most of the time he is running forward, but there are some stand-off situations where he has to shoot enemies from behind a barrel that you peek out to shoot or get shot. There are also little bonus mini games where you can fire two guns at once at pigeons, and all these transition beautifully into each other. This is one of the most ingenious uses for Kinect I have seen, and the on-rails move and shoot works a lot better for this game than it has for others in the past. That doesn’t mean it won’t be a bit weird to get used to.

“Really?  Brand new, brown military shooters are lacking in innovation? I would have never guessed!” – SebastianSB

Patches and title updates aren’t a bad thing when used properly.  Hydrophobia was released in working condition, but it was plagued with design flaws that annoyed players and led to a lot of complaints.  In response to criticism, developer Dark Energy Digital set out to revamp their entire game for free in order to please those who felt let down by the title.  This gave us Hydrophobia Pure, an update that reworked the map, controls, physics, dialog, HUD, cutscenes, camera, and even graphics in the game.  They had clearly put a lot a love into their game and wanted to make it better once flaws has been brought to their attention.  I think that we can all agree this is a perfect example on how to improve your game with patches.

We start having a problem when developers and publishers use patches as an excuse to catapult sub-par products onto store shelves.  Dead Island is the latest example of this, releasing a day one patch that contains thirty-seven changes ranging from minor tweaks to a fix for a glitch that would make your entire inventory vanish.  Dead Island was heavily reliant upon provocative advertising for sales, so the guys in charge of the release were more than willing to cut some corners in order to honor that heavily publicized release date.

I want to make it clear that the people behind Dead Island were well aware of these problems when they shipped this game.  Due to the incredible complexity that games have today, there are guaranteed to be glitches somewhere.  We tend to trust that the developer will hire testers to iron out all of the major issues and give us a smooth experience.  A minor quirk might get through and make a funny video for Game Fails, but those hiccups are rare and difficult to replicate if the testing process was handled properly.  The important thing to recognize in this situation is that the millions of hours of combined play time that a game gets after its wide release creates an opportunity for finding glitches that is hundreds of times more effective than any group of game testers could be.  This is not, however, how the Dead Island crew discovered their problems.  The speed at which this patch arrived means that they had to have been working on it before the game even reached reviewers.

There are three problems that this creates for players.  First, all of these reviewers complain about the game feeling unfinished and unstable, but we get a day one patch that they never had.  How do we know whether or not the problems addressed are the same ones that colored their reviews?  Players like Philip Defranco are still mentioning glitchy experiences after the patch was meant to fix them.  This undecided final quality level will likely be more than enough encouragement for PC players with itchy fingers to download the game illegally.  There’s also no guarantee in this situation that players will be allowed to download the patch when the developer would like them to.  Each platform has its own process for approving game content, and any mixture of technical difficulties could delay the patch.  Finally, every time you create an additional step that one must take in order to reach the optimum experience in a game there will always be a group of players that do not take it.  You may be able to assume that Steam players will get every update automatically, but there is still a percentage of players on the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 that don’t connect their consoles to the internet.  You can make all of the rude comments that you want about how they need to get with the 21st century and whatnot, but these are loyal paying customers that do not deserve to be swept under a rug after they pay $60 for a game.  Whatever content makes it onto the disc, glitches and all, is the only version of the game that a developer can guarantee every player will experience.

Ultimately, that’s the moral issue that we run into in this situation.  The game that comes on the disc is the game that the developer and publisher are saying is worth your money.  There may be a free way to improve it somewhere at some time, but the contents of that box are the experience that you’re being sold.  It’s disgusting to know that they’re willing to put out something that they know is flawed just so that they can meet their heavily advertised release date.  As a result they come across as a high school student who failed a test that he didn’t study for last night but is promising that he’ll study really hard for the next one.  Whose fault is this?  As a consumer I have no reason to care.  All that I am concerned about is the fact that I’m being sold an unfinished game in a box that proudly displays the names of a series of companies that shouldn’t be so pleased with themselves.

I’ve heard people joke that playing a shooter online during the first few weeks is the same thing as playing the beta, but how far from the truth is that?  If we continue to be so accepting of issues like these there won’t be much left to stop publishers from simply testing each title on us.

You play as “The Kid,” a white-haired boy who wakes up one day to find that his world is simply gone.  An event referred to as The Calamity has wiped out the landscape and turned your people into ash.  The entire story is narrated by an old man named Rucks, who you meet when you reach the Bastion.  Aside from orating your trials Rucks also fills in a lot of details about what the world was like before the Calamity and why it happened.  Everything is cleverly paced with plenty foreshadowing and well-time revelations.  The true strength of this approach to storytelling is that it never interrupts the gameplay.  A friend of mine that goes by the tag dudecrazy108 has a tendency to skip through conversations and cut scenes as quickly as possible so that he can get back to the action.  When he completed Bastion he didn’t just understand the story, he actually cared about it!  The developers got him to care about the world and its characters by teaching him about them in a way that didn’t bring the gameplay to a screeching halt, and I applaud them for it.

Best friends forever, right Zulf? Uh...Zulf?

The gameplay feels like a breath of fresh air for a genre that has been largely stagnant for the last decade.  For the first time in a long while I found myself not referring to a dungeon-crawler as a Diablo clone.  Rather than having hundreds of nearly identical clubs and swords that differ only in their stats, Bastion gives you a dozen weapons that each encourage their own style of play.  There’s a slow, powerful hammer for those that just want to smash stuff, an even slower mortar for players who want to plan their approach and rain destruction down from afar, and a war machete that unleashes a flurry of weak, very close range attacks and doubles as a throwing weapon.  When you’re under attack you can either block or roll to protect yourself.  Blocking is effective against most of the smaller enemies, but relying too heavily on it can quickly get you surrounded by enemies.  More capable players will instead use it only at the instant of the attack in order to unleash a powerful counterattack.  Rolling away is very effective for avoiding damage, but finding a safe direction to roll in becomes more and more difficult as you traverse the narrow paths made of floating debris.  The result of all this is that you end up with a dungeon-crawler whose combat relies more on timing and strategy over monotonous grinding.  Rather than functioning as simply a means to an end the fighting feels rewarding in itself.

The visuals are stunning, and clearly got more love than what you see in most AAA titles these days.  The environments have been hand-painted and look beautiful.  Characters and enemies are rendered in a cartoonish style that allows for quick identification while still leaving room for a lot of detail.  Early screenshots made me worried that Bastion would be plagued by visual chaos, but once everything is moving it becomes very easy to tell what’s going on.  Did I make a cut scene’s painting my desktop background for several weeks?  Of course I did.

This won't be leaving your head for quite some time.

I have a bad habit of listening to podcasts and custom soundtracks while I play games because the audio of a title often becomes either boring or grating for me after a few hours.  With Basion I never even considered turning on the Drunk Tank or TED Talks because whenever I wasn’t hooked to Rucks’ story I was enamored by the incredible music in this game.  Darren Korb’s score seamlessly blends a wide variety of instruments and digital sounds together into a very modern take on folk music, and the beat just keeps pushing you to play forward.  I purchased the official soundtrack as soon as I beat the game and now know a few people who don’t even play games that are listening to the soundtrack in their cars on a daily basis.

I would estimate Bastion to be about five hours long.  That’s plenty content for $15 when compared to the many popular retail titles that often clock in at the same length for four times the price, but RPG fans used to longer games may be disappointed.  If you think that paying $10-20 for a memorable-but-short game is worth the money (see: Portal, Braid, Limbo) then Bastion should be right up your alley.  Players looking to squeeze more time out of the game will be pleased by the New Game+ feature, the series of gods you can invoke for additional challenge, and trial that can be run for each weapon in the game in order to put your reflexes and creativity to the test.  The only other complaint I can predict is that some hardcore RPG enthusiasts might look at the changes that I loved so much and refer to the game as shallow in much the same way they would talk about the changes between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2.

Where it all begins.

Overall, I’m glad to give Bastion a glowing review and recommend that everyone reading this at least try the demo.  It is one of the best titles that I have ever played on XBLA (of which I have quite a few) and a serious contender for Game of the Year.

Quick tip for anyone who buys this game on Steam:  I recommend playing this game with a windows controller or any other compatible gamepad that has two joysticks.  Navigating various diagonal catwalks with the WASD keys while trying to aim at distant opponents with your mouse can become incredibly awkward, and feels like you’re being told to maneuver two small objects on the screen while only being able to look directly at one at a time.  Being able to move with one stick and aim with the other on a radial plane lets you focus all of your attention on your character and his immediate dangers, making the game a lot less frustrating to play.

P.S. Did I mention the damn soundtrack?!

Fallout 3

Removing the Dillema from Moral Decisions.  This happens in a lot of games, but Extra Credits reminded me of a perfect example in Fallout 3.  In the DLC entitled The Pitt you arrive at a scenario where you must decide to either kidnap an innocent girl to aid the prisoners or to kill them all in order to defend her.  Neither decision is inherently good or bad.  If you help the girl you have to kill an entire community of people.  If you help the people who are trapped in the Pitt you have to steal and endanger a perfectly innocent child that has done nothing to cause or deserve to be in this situation.  If this was all that there was to the situation it would be an impressive dilemma, but once you make your choice you’re rewarded with either positive or negative karma based on which decision the developer arbitrarily decided was good or bad.  In essence the developer is telling you that there’s a correct answer to a question that should be left wide open.

Many games also have certain perks or abilities that are only available to players who are purely good or entirely evil.  Not only does this remove the chance for a dilemma, but it also removes choice altogether.  Any player who is aware of these unlockables is going to play through the entire game as either a saint or a demon, grinding their way toward that special spell in the same way they would with an experience bar.  All of the complexity that is required to create a meaningful experience is banished and replaced by a stat ticker.

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair

No Local Multiplayer.  When Castlevania: Harmony of Despair came out, I was definitely excited to jump with in and give it a try.  So I went online and had an absolute blast playing through it.  The game is perfectly oriented toward multiplayer, after all; the levels aren’t particularly long or anything, but you really have to work together to get through it and there’s a nice sense of accomplishment once you do.  So, the next day I talk up the game to my brother and he agrees to play and…wait? What? No local multiplayer?  This is when you realize the game is too oriented around MP; playing single player, especially early on, is practically impossible.  Why make this decision?  I can certainly understand capping local multiplayer at four due to that being the maximum number of controller inputs on the 360, but none at all is simply baffling.

Mafia II

“Why is this wanted poster on the roof?!”  We’ve all played our fair share of sandbox titles by now.  You have a series of missions on your map that can be undertaken in order to progress a branched story, but you can also pour hours into the side missions and a series of silly minigames.  Mafia II has none of that.  You play an entirely linear, story-driven campaign that offers no additional content or reasons to deviate from the path.  That’s completely okay by me.  I really enjoyed the story in Mafia II and think that making it linear was the right call, but why does the sandbox mechanic exist?  It seems to only be there as an excuse to jam collectibles into the game or so that the level designers can show off all of their hard work.  Waking up in my own bed, driving to work, and then driving back after each mission did nothing to enhance the experience.  L.A. Noire made the smarter call of having each case start out with you already at the station, and it ends each mission the moment the case has been solved.

Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock

Flashy but Pointless.  GH: WoR introduced introduced a new gameplay element where you would pick up a variety of powers throughout the game’s career.  The problem was that all you can do in Guitar Hero is play the notes on the screen and activate Star Power, so all of these abilities had to be passive.  This meant that you could get more star power, protect your streaks, avoid failing, and enjoy several other passive effects.  Because they were all passive, though, they actually did nothing to impact the gameplay because you were still doing the exact same thing.  Aside from some flashy effects on the screen the only real impact they had on players was to make it impossible to get any meaningful scores during their playthrough and to force achievement hunters to play through the entire campaign a second time.

From Dust

“Listen to the giant ball of sand, dammit!”  From Dust was a very interesting and unique take on the god game, and I thoroughly enjoyed playing through the story.  It wasn’t until I reached the challenge mode that things began to fall apart.  In this game you have zero control over villagers aside from telling them where to build.  You can’t even control which ones do what you want them to do.  This means that when you’re in the final challenge and the entire island is sinking if you ask them to build a village on top of the mountain you might as well be asking them to fly.  They’ll take the worst possible route, get blocked by an impossible-to-see damp spot, or even come from the farthest possible village that is already isolated from you goal.  This can leads to hours of repeated attempts on a challenge that you already know the solution for, and it really shines a bright light on every single flaw that the game has.  From Dust was a game about finding creative solutions to complicated problems, but the challenge mode felt more like a time trial mod created by a fan that failed to recognize From Dust’s limitations.

Rock Band 3

Pro Drums Mode is like a Ninja!  Rock Band 3 gave fans access to a “pro” mode that allowed them to play more realistic versions of their favorite songs.  This meant guitar and bass players could perform their parts with a controller that had strings and frets, keyboardists had full access to two octaves of keys, and drummers could play the cymbals in their songs if they bought the correct drum expansion.  Much to our surprise, every single drum chart ever released by Harmonix already had a pro drum chart that we had simply never had access to before.  It was nothing but good news at the time, but I can’t help but wonder why we had never been allowed to play them before.  After all, that’s a lot of work to put into a piece of the game that no one could play.  There were already fairly useless cymbal add-ons for the drum kit out on the market, so why not use those?  Stranger still is the fact that those cymbal packs only had two additional pads even though the drum charts that already existed had three.  Early Rock Band Network authors were never given the ability to chart pro drums, so the first several hundred RBN tracks are actually the only ones in existence that lack this feature.

Phantom Band Mate.  Rock Band 3 added a fifth instrument, the keyboard, but still only shows four characters on the stage at once.  You can have a bass player or a keys player on stage, but not both.  It’s truly a bizarre sight to see when you’re playing with five or seven players.  Seeing various band members chime in helps the harmonies make sense, but are we meant to believe that the drummer is farting out that sick piano solo?

Tug-o’-WHAT?!  Being able to access the leaderboard and filter to your friends for any song in your library is a pretty cool addition, but it seems to have come at the cost of traditional competitive modes.  Remember Score Duel, that head to head battle mode that’s been in every Rock Band and Guitar Hero game so far?  Gone.  It really caught me by surprise because I can’t remember the last multiplayer music game I played that didn’t allow me to face off against my friend locally.  The primary person that I used to play Rock Band 2 with has almost lost interest entirely because of this change alone.  It’s rare to see a sequel that decides to drop a feature altogether.

All Instrument Mode and the Online Confusion.  In order to allow more than four local players Harmonix added an “All Instruments Mode,” which allows the vocalist to play without using a profile.  They essentially don’t count as a player.  This makes perfect sense for local play, but for some reason you’re also limited to four players when you go online.  Most FPS titles allow up to 16 players and Guitar Hero managed to get up to eight, so why does Rock Band 3 have this limit?  What makes the situation even more odd is that you can’t just use any combination of four instruments.  A four player online band must have a drummer, a singer, and any two of the three remaining instruments.  This means that you can’t have a guitar, bass, and keys player in the same session.  Why?  One might assume that it has to do with there only being either a bass or keys player on stage at a time, but Harmonix had no problem with allowing invisible band mates in All Instruments Mode.

“Harmonies, why do you hate me?“  Harmonies were introduced in Beatles Rock Band and allow up to three singers to share the vocals in a song.  This leads to some pretty interesting and challenging experiences in songs like Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, where each singer can end up playing wildly different roles in the song at the same time.  You can only use this mode locally, however.  A lot of this follows a similar mindset as my complaints about playing as a full band online.  Console games already allow for you to get a massive number of players into a single game, so why is the multiplayer so limited in Rock Band 3?  Simply allow us to get a group of seven people together in a lobby based on what instruments we are using.  The three singers could choose which of the three colors they’re going to play as in a similar manner to how the guitarist and bass player choose their parts.  I keep hearing the bandwidth excuse, but the singers don’t necessarily need to hear each other as long as the game can tell whether or not they end each phrase with a Triple Awesome or not.  This would actually reduce confusion while singing harmonies because you wouldn’t have to deal with overlapping lines or multiple sets of lyrics.

The Great Wall of Gray.  This one is more of a personal issue.  I have a pretty massive collection of Rock Band DLC, and for obvious reason the cross section between my collection and that of three other people can get very small.  This means that I have to scroll through hundreds of songs with dimmed titles in order to figure out what I’m allowed to play.  Rock Band 3 added an impressive amount of sorting options and filters to the series, so I can’t help but wonder why none of them allow me to hide the songs that I’m unable to play during online sessions.  Instead I usually just don’t bother adding songs to our setlist and allow everyone else to figure it out.

Bioshock

Achievement Denied!  We all know by now about the audio diaries in Bioshock.  They do an excellent job of filling in the back story of Rapture, but there was also an achievement that required you to find them all.  “No problem,” you might say, “the entire game lets you free-roam, anyway!”  While this is certainly true for the vast majority of the game’s world, there are actually a couple collectibles hidden in the very first area of the game which you are never allowed to return to.  Who doesn’t love reaching the end of a game, only to realize that you ruined your chance at an achievement during the first five minutes?

Bulletstorm

“Did they forget what game they were working on?”  Bulletstorm advertises itself as a playful run-and-gun shooter that has a heavy emphasis on killing enemies in unique and humorous ways.  The multiplayer mode certainly allows for some creativity, but the campaign completely drops the ball here.  Most of the linear environments only have one object in the environment that allows for interesting kills, and that lone object will simply repeat itself throughout the level until the game switches to a different lone object.  Before long a game that pretends to be packed with variety actually feels monotonous and annoying.  They also betrayed the classic run-and-gun vibe that they were going for by making your character fairly easy to kill.  This meant that instead of storming through a level with your bad ass powers at hand you had to progress through battles slowly and with caution because sticking your head out for a few seconds too long meant that it would be ripped from your body.

Call of Duty

“What kind of shooter rewards you ’cause you got shot?”  Multiple recent Call of Duty titles feature a perk that allows you to stay “alive” for a while longer after you’ve been killed so that you can shoot back at your attackers.  You have a limited field of view and a generally lower chance of actually scoring a kill while this perk is active, but it’s a chance that you really shouldn’t be given in the first place.  You died fair and square, so why should you be rewarded?

“Who am I and why am I doing this?”  Call of Duty games have a bad tendency to switch back and forth between multiple characters in the middle of a campaign.  This makes an already convoluted and nonsensical plot even more confusing, and often frustrates players that are trying to understand what’s going on rather than just mindlessly shooting their way through each stage.  This was actually used well in Call of Duty 4 (the nuke!), but the positive feedback earned by that game seems to have kicked this habit into overdrive.  I honestly can’t tell you how many individual characters I played as in Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops because none of them are really defined as characters by anything but their names.  Several characters only exist so that you can immediately die as them.  I don’t recommend that even the biggest fans try to untangle this web of overlapping perspectives and plot lines because in the end your only reward will be the realization that it doesn’t really make sense.  Or is that a spoiler?

Silent Hill Homecoming

“Why doesn’t down go up?!”  Yes, I know that not every game is a flight sim and I know it’s not the norm, but I’m one of those folks that inverts controls on *every* game (minus Child of Eden, for some reason).  Silent Hill Homecoming was made practically unplayable for the inversion-challenged by the developer’s curious decision to not include an inversion option for the title.  Inversion is so common that it’s a setting on the Xbox itself, but apparently not a big enough thing to include in Silent Hill.  I guess they helt they had to make it more horrifying by causing me to look skyward while I’m attempting to strike the low-to-the-ground enemies that are presently gnawing at my knees.  I enjoyed Silent Hill Homecoming, but the only other game I can think of that lacked an inversion option was Yaris.  Any time you’re in such dubious company, you know there’s trouble.

World of Warcraft

You WERE Prepared.  Millions of people bought World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade, because they wanted to try their hand at taking down Illidan, the ultimate baddie.  This guy was massive, with freaky tattoos, horns, wings, and two glowing green warglaives that every warrior and rogue wanted for themselves.  In a beautiful cinematic he greeted each new player with the foreboding line, “you are not prepared!”  You couldn’t actually fight him at launch, but that was okay because you knew that he was going to be the big final boss of the expansion.  He was planned to be in the Tier 6 dungeon, so players had to battle their way through the 4th and 5th tiers of dungeons in order to gain access.  The Black Temple turned out to be one hell of a challenge, but before long many guilds had made their way though and killed the guy that was on the cover art of their expansion pack.  The Sunwell dungeon was soon introduced, which many called Tier 6.5.  Until that point everyone had seemed to think that Illidan was the boss of the Burning Crusade expansion, so this was unexpected.  Did Blizzard get surprised by how quickly their community progressed through their game and decide to release content from the Lich King expansion early in order to buy themselves more time?  I sure think so.

Star Ocean: The Last Hope

Front-Loaded Tutorial From Hell.  The most recent Star Ocean game hits you right from the start with a simply massive tutorial.  I had never played a game in the series before and had no concept in mind for what the combat would be like, so I made the mistake of going through all of it.  After spending an hour with the various tactics and mumbo jumbo I had already forgotten most of the content that I had covered earlier in that session.  Put off and still mostly confused, I ended up playing a different game entirely and didn’t touch the title for a good nine months.  Much to my surprise the combat actually felt pretty simplistic.  If you want a good example of why J-RPG titles haven’t been in their golden age for a while, this is a great example.  This was a case where the unintuitive, convoluted design of a game actually prevented me from starting the story!

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I hope that you’ve enjoyed our ranting.  If we have enough ideas in the future we just might do this again.

Contributions:

(Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, Silent Hill Homecoming)

I feel that the topic doesn’t have much resolution that is universal, but I mention it because a recent two part episode of Extra Credits made a really compelling point by talking about both the logical and personal issues associated with game addiction.

Extra Credits:

Gaming Addiction Part 1

Gaming Addiction Part 2.1

Gaming Addiction Part 2.2

At the end of it all you come to realize that you have two options, either overcome the addiction or give into it. To be afraid of the real world is irrational.  You cannot fear life because life is whatever you decide. If someone feels they want to play games and never go outside, let them, it only effects themselves and I can relate to most gamers when saying reality has nothing to offer more than what I can get inside a video game. While I don’t lock myself from the world, I do spend more time playing games and watching anime than the average person. I can tell you more about video game and anime characters better than our own presidents, and I remember events in games and episodes of anime more than I remember important dates in history. But all of that is by choice, not because I am being controlled by anything, or because I am afraid, I just find the real world to be boring and prefer the alternate world to the real one. In the end it is just a video game, or it is just a show, or it is just whatever you are addicted to. You can always quit at any time, it just depends on how strong your resolve is.

SebastianSB’s Take:

Back when I played World of Warcraft I knew a few people who seemed to be genuinely addicted to the game.  They would wake up in the morning, eat their three meals while playing the game, maybe shower during mid-afternoon, then go back to sleep.  It became distressing to watch them pass up or even vehemently refuse their chances to spend time with friends or family.  Sure they could go down to the beach, but then they wouldn’t have time to gather the gold they need to purchase that epic flying mount this week.

After hundreds of hours you might be able to kill this guy for a less than 1% chance of getting one of his weapons.

I was sure that I would never fall into this trap, but then I tried raiding.  Before I knew it World of Warcraft had become a full time job.  Killing some boss monster for a 5% chance to get a dagger that had a 50-50 chance of going to either myself or the other rogue in the group had become the most important thing in the world.  We eventually managed to kill Illidan, the big bad boss of the Burning Crusade expansion pack, but my habits had begun to change for the better long before that.  I had become painfully aware that I was being manipulated into devoting days of my life to making sure that a set of meaningless numbers would increase periodically.  Years later I would learn from Extra Credits that this mechanic was known as Skinner’s Box.  I realized that I wasn’t even enjoying the game any more.  I was mostly just continuing out of habit and a fear of losing contact with the friends that I had made.  I quit and refocused my attention on my studies.

I plan on playing The Old Republic once it eventually hits the shelves because Bioware is one of my favorite developers out there.  I’m not afraid of how the game will affect me because I know that I’ve matured greatly since my time with World of Warcraft.  I’ll enjoy the game, but I won’t stop learning to play my guitar, I won’t stop practicing with my digital art, I won’t let it interfere with my geology degree, and I sure as hell won’t be letting it stop me from having experiences like the one I had last night.  Five friends and I went walking through the woods, flashlights in hand, with the only other source of light being the stars.  We laughed, talked about bad horror films, and generally scared the crap out of each other.  Video games are an incredible source of entertainment, but they’ll never replace nights like that.

Originally debuting on Xbox Live Indie Games, Breath of Death VII was released for the PC market with Cthulhu Saves the World. Don’t look for BoD I-VI.  They don’t exist, and that is part of the charm of these games. They aren’t trying to be something they shouldn’t. They are derivative and they know it. They know you have played this game before. They are meant more as an homage/spoof of old school RPG’s such as the Final Fantasy and Breath of Fire series.

If you have ever played any Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire… well, basically any JRPG from NES up to PS2 you already know how these games play. They don’t break new ground in the RPG multiverse, but they do add some nice tweaks. You wander around a large world map fighting monsters and pursuing the Ultimate Bad Guy (UBG). This is about all I will say about it. As I said, we’ve played this game before.

Every location has random battles, but there is a limit, and this is the best tweak to the old system they made. Once you fight all the battles for an area there will be no more random battles. You can however force a battle by choosing Fight from the menu. This lead to me entering an area and choosing to fight over and over again until the encounter counter (heh) reached 0. Then I could just explore without worry of getting interrupted. In some of the longer dungeons this may have been what kept me from giving up in disgust. Some of the dungeons are long, labyrinthine affairs that would have had me totally lost if I had to stop focusing on finding my way to fight some monsters every 20 steps.

What made these games so appealing to me were the length and the story. Each game can be played all the way through in less than ten hours. I think I did them in about eight hours each. You can save anywhere, which made them perfect for picking up and playing in 15 minute chunks if I wanted to. Completing the story will open up a harder mode, and there are a couple of other game modes you can try it out if you haven’t had enough by the end of the story.

The games will never win awards for great storytelling, instead relying on tongue in cheek humor and standard RPG tropes to get you from one point to the next. BoD VII is the standard tale of a party of adventurers seeking an ultimate reward at the end of an epic quest (or as epic as you can get in nine hours). Cthulhu puts you in the role of a powerless demon trying to get his powers back… by becoming a true hero . I thought the concept of Cthulhu trying to get his evil powers back by becoming a true good guy so he could be evil again was a cute nod to the obvious twists you see in some of the older RPG’s. Liberally sprinkled with humor, both stories will have you laughing out loud in several places as you recognize the game reference they are taking a shot at.

Is pretending to be the good guy the same as being a good guy?

The games don’t build off of each other, so it doesn’t matter which one you play first, but I’m glad I played them in release order and went for BoD VII first. It’s the weaker of the two. You only have 4 characters, each weapon/armor choice is better than the one you have, and the story was more traditional. Cthulhu introduced more characters than you can have in your party at one time, and the weapon and armor choices weren’t always so clear.

One caveat I need to mention is gamepad play. You can play with the keyboard, but to use a gamepad you either need an Xbox 360 controller or a program that allows you to remap key strokes to your gamepad. Both of these games were written using XNA, and using a non-360 controller in XNA is much too difficult to bother with in games this size and price point.

Don’t expect brilliant writing and game play from these titles. But do expect a solid enjoyable experience. Factor in that the 2 pack will only cost you $3 and you have a winner any way you look at it.

(Okay, maybe this wasn’t so micro a review after all)

My Anti-Social Networking Links

Whether they are noticed or not, bass lines are a fundamental part of a rock song, so an impressive melody that manages to catch the attention of the listener is a plus at most times. Surely a bass line like that must be hard to play? Not always. I’m not talking about Geddy Lee typical Rush song; impressive, yes, difficult…yes. I’m talking about a bass line that stands out in a song and doesn’t require the skill of a god to play (theoretically speaking).

Pearl Jam – Jeremy

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It might be hard to tell from that staff, but it’s a melody that’s haunting and powerful and played slow enough so every note hits you. It’s almost anthemic and introduces the character “Jeremy” before Eddie has even sung anything. As the song progresses there are a few hits and flows to make it seem unpredictable, and when the Guitars are brought into the mix the haunting feeling turns into anger.  It’s not any wonder that it works so well.  It’s a pentatonic scale, the thing that every guitarist uses to write those awesome solos.

No Doubt – Hella Good

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I’m pretty sure Seb has banned me from going on about Dance Central again and again, so I won’t. “Hella Good” starts off as blatant rip off of “Billie Jean”, and it’s probably not helped by a bass-line that has only two notes. But it’s a bass-line that adds grunt to a song made for dancing. It’s almost reminiscent of Thin Lizzy’s swing style songs, which wouldn’t be a step out of the influence of No Doubt.

Santana – Black Magic Woman

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“Black Magic Woman” was originally written by Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, and it sits perfectly on the pentatonic scale so it’s bluesy.  Six well placed eighth notes give it a Latin rock groove that’s just asking for people to dance to it. If anything it took the song and made it more ensnaring than it was intended. Your fingers just dance on the strings while playing it. As this line is running the rest of the band are trying to bring the audience under a spell (that was intended), and the bassist is just sitting back and relaxing with something so simple.

Fleetwood Mac – The Chain

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We just mentioned Fleetwood Mac, but this is after Peter Green and into the Lindsay Buckingham era. Look at that piece.  It looks like a simple up and down scale.  Too vanilla to be anything truly resonating, right? Well, that line took the United Kingdom by storm, I know it as the second song from “The Chain”, but until 1997 it was widely known as the F1 theme for the BBC. It then disappeared into the nether regions of history after they lost coverage to ITV, until coverage came back to the BBC only two years ago. It’s not part of pentatonic, it’s part of the first scale/chord you will ever learn if you want to learn music theory, but it’s just bawling with pent-up energy.

Nirvana – Come As You Are

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That thing in the intro of the song? Yeah. That’s a bass. No that’s not a joke. The latter era of grunge has a tendency to be creepy and menacing, Krist Novoselic probably created this by accident, but it completely ties up with the song’s theme of sadness, world-weariness and Mr. Grohl’s beat. How? It should be a pentatonic like everything else, but that little sharp puts it as part of a blues scale.  That clever bastard.

Why all this? Well it sort of ties in with Seb’s GetYourShitTogether programme. If you take a look at what he’s played on the guitar, it would be hard to believe that he was an absolute never-touched-an-actual-guitar beginner only ten weeks ago, and already he’s playing “Just What I Needed”! That is a lot harder than it might seem at first glance, but here almost the opposite is true. These are some of the easiest bass-lines (with the exception of “With or Without You”) ever heard, and you might not have even noticed!

As for me. Well this is my sort of obsessive geekiness. Spending hours taking apart a song just to figure out why I like it. It’s almost compulsive.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is everything you should expect from a movie with that title.  You get your explanation of how it happened, you get your bad ass action sequences, and you get some powerful performances from characters that you actually care about.  Andy Serkis plays Caesar, a genetically modified chimp that you get to see grow up for the first half of the movie.  His IQ is doubling on a yearly basis, and his face alone expresses his feelings as he grows from a naive, hyper little guy to a man to ponders his unique situation and the wrongness of it all.  He isn’t fully satisfied by his life with the doctor (James Franco) who smuggled him out of the lab and raised him, but he seems content.  When unfortunate circumstances land him in a primate shelter he comes face to face with how cruel man can be though a bully played by Tom Felton (formerly Draco Malfoy).  By the time that the uprising begins, Caesar’s motives feel entirely justified.  Instead of a evil, angry super-chimp villain we’re given a thoroughly interesting and complicated one.  He feels like a real person, and once you get past that initial suspension of disbelief you never for a second question that.  I would be shocked if Sekis didn’t get a nomination because of this film.

Wrecked has been done better already.  Adrien Brody wakes up after a big car crash to find that he’s stuck, his leg is injured, and he has no idea who or where he is.  He screams, he cries, he hallucinates, he sleeps, he pees himself, and so on.  If you’re a fan of Adrien Brody then his excellent acting could probably carry you through the movie, but aside from the lead actor there just isn’t much to like.  The majority of the movie just focuses on him struggling with his leg, with occasional clashes with wildlife or natural obstacles.  Wrecked isn’t a terrible movie, but it can feel boring and overly long at times.  A film can only rely on one person’s talents to a certain point before all of the other weak spots start to shine through.  Viewers interested in this movie are better off watching Buried instead.

Drive Angry is pure grindhouse.  If you’ve been looking for your ‘B’ movie fix, look no further.  Nicolas Cage plays a father who comes back from hell to avenge his daughter’s death and save her baby.  All he really has is a few guns and a knack for surviving fatal wounds while he hunts down a villain that’s as simple as they come.  The bad guy is simply bad, and you want to see him taken down.  He tortures, rapes, murders, worships the devil, you name it.  Throughout the movie Cage is pursued by one of the devil’s men, who seems entirely disinterested in what’s going on.  He just pulls moves straight from The Matrix while casually going about his day as if it’s routine, making various remarks about people’s misconceptions of hell.  Drive Angry serves as a great example of how mindless action can be done right.  I found it vastly more entertaining than anything we’ve been getting from the likes of Michael Bay.  Just remember that it’s still grindhouse, not Inception.

I Am Number Four is a movie that I sincerely hope fails to launch a franchise.  There are a group of aliens on Earth that are trying to blend in with the general public because another group of aliens that reminded me of Star Trek (2009)’s Romulans are hunting them down in a specific order?  Why kill them in order?  Never explained.  Number Three was just killed, so you follow Number Four as he tries to pretend to be a high school student.  Unfortunately, Number Four is a massive idiot so he’s immediately using his powers in the open and generally going out of his way to shine a spotlight on himself.  When his protector tries to warn him Four acts like he’s the bad guy for trying to keep him alive, and the movie actually seems to side with Four!  Insert irritating angst, generic high school bully, and awkward romance scenes and you’ve got the majority of the film.  When the Romulans finally launch their big attack and Number Six enters the scene we’re treated with some surprisingly cool fight scenes that are packed with teleportation, energy beams, acrobatics, you name it.  The final scenes feel like they’re the end of a much better movie, and I almost want to recommend the film just for that.  I just can’t wish the first hour of this movie on anyone, though.  We need to do what we can to stop supporting this trend that seems to be a response to Harry Potter where you get actors in their 20′s to play teenagers with some sort of super powers or other excuse to brood all day.  Twilight, Number Four, Beastly?  If you’re going to borrow elements from a successful franchise, how about you borrow the part where it’s good?  Avoid.

Super is a mixed bag.  You watch as a socially inept man loses his wife and seeks revenge through a superhero persona.  It starts out as a dark comedy, but it continues to get darker and darker as it progresses, leaving most of the comedy behind.  Expect some creepy scenes, uncalled for violence, and a whole lot of gore.  Ellen Page joins in as the sidekick, and the movie is almost worth watching just to see Page go bat shit insane on screen.  For better or for worse Super is probably the most accurate representation of what sort of things could happen if someone tried to fight street crimes as a masked hero.  It’s passable, but if you’re on the fence I would recommend giving it a shot.  If nothing else it’s memorable.