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I rented King Kong and Armored Core 2. Kong is about what I expected. Pretty dull gameplay, a pleasant cinematic epic quality to some scenes and locations, a good effort to tell story during gameplay without mode breaking for cutscenes, and an admittedly meager attempt at interacting with other characters doing their own things around you, but at least it is an attempt. It sounded much better on paper, though. Also, I'm aghast at the way the game is broken up into small segments.

AC2 is my first AC game. I got it because I read that AC series overview that was, I think, linked to from insertcredit. I'm pretty disappointed with it, though. At least in the beginning, it's just a lot of very short destroy-them-all missions. I hate mission-based games, and I hate them even more when there isn't even a gameplay existence between missions. I was done with stage selecting from a menu after the Mega Man games; can we move on and try something coherent, please? Does this get better? Is there even a story? Should I bother playing it, or should I just buy a copy of Chulip and move on?

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oh. =(

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for reasons i mentioned, or just within the realm of its strengths?

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I bought Psychonauts!

I love love love it and I can't think of anything except spending more time with it. I'm going to leave work early today, whoppeee!

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I got stuck in Psychonauts. =( I felt so clever when I got into the Sewage Authority building, but I can't figure out how to get to the Book Depository. I may need to use an faq. =( =(

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omg you guys we bought some RAM recently and i just ran the Steam Half-Life 2 demo and IT WORKS so I bought Half-Life 2 I am finally going to play Half-Life 2 you guys omg


going to play through HL1 again first, I have both regular and Source, but I think I've been told that regular is best, is that right? Ok then!

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Oh man i have so much to do:

Turn over my EVE assets to the small corporation I was in and terminate my character
Planescape: Torment (again)
Half-Life (again)
-supplements
Half-Life 2
-supplements
Homeworld (again)
Homeworld 2 (again)
-PDS and Complex mods, if I can make them work this time
Psychonauts
I guess I could finish FFXII sometime also
Oh and I bought Grim Fandango on ebay
The Neverhood is too expensive to buy though

Getting laid off from work was the best thing that ever happened to me!

Thanks for the new title Toups. Hi-five!

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Tough call! I can see that your day-to-day is besot with difficult decisions.

I dunno if it's the re-release or not, Cycle, but I did pay about $10. I doubt I could find it in a store around here.

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Since my last post, I have finished Half-Life, gone part-way through Opposing Force, and, unable to wait any longer, begun Half-Life 2. I am currently saved in a control center under a huge bridge and I am just about to deactivate the security field so I can drive across it but when I do the Combine will know I have compromised their base here and they will immediately send reinforcements (well, not immediately; first there will be a very pregnant pause as the wind howls eerily, tangibly shakes the broken windows, and sirens call in the distance, all while I begin crying / laughing hysterically with apprehension), including a hovering gunship, and I will be forced to retrace my steps while staving off all of these forces and firing rockets at the gunship when opportunities present themselves. See, what's really, really brilliant is, the first time, see, I figured I'd just hold up in that room with all the broken windows, see, and I was sort of thinking about Metal Gear Solid, but then you see I ran out of rockets, and see the whole time I was going through the bridge I knew I was going to have to bring down one of these because there were so fucking many rockets lying around, but see I didn't need any of them, so you see the brilliant thing is that they force you to ammo up on the go in small doses so that you have to regain ground, fight the ground troops, and worry about the gunship all at the same time, because they set things so simply, so matter-of-factly, such that you can't just take care of any one thing and move on to the next. This is chapter 7 now. You have to do all of those older things at the same time, bitch.

Unfortunately, my.. FPS personality is very methodical. I tend to explore everywhere and search everything and be a gatherer first, hunter second. Don't get me wrong -- I love killing things, and fighting the Combine troops is every bit as varied and open and fun as fighting the Ocelot unit in MGS3. But the game is designed to flow exceptionally well. And I can see that. And usually it does. Except for the load times. That segments it. But mostly it's my play style. It's rare that I don't run through a fight at least three times. Usually that's just to "get it better", although sometimes it is because I legitimately did suck.

Also, I think it's very odd what they did with the vehicle segments -- to make the player stop and get out so many times. I think it's very odd, and brave, and I really like it.

My favorite part of the game is still the first two chapters, just because they established a sense of setting like nothing else I've ever come across, and then ramped up bit-by-bit, so smooth, so exciting, which is in stark contrast to the way Half-Life kicked off. Although, to be fair, Half-Life had great ramp as well. Replaying it the other day, I was surprised at how well, almost ten years later, the game continuously evokes this thought in me: "This is bad, man." Bit-by-bit, things go from bad to worse to.. more worse. The difference is, the element that introduces danger into HL2 is a fundamental part of that world itself. Gordon is essentially in the wrong building at the wrong time. Also, you can take damage from those guards before that time when they begin pursuing you, when you head to the roof, just by getting in their faces. My point is, the ramp-up in HL2 feels incredibly organic and smooth, as well as aesthetically and thematically practical!

I mean, chapter 1 was pretty much the most immersive videogame experience I have ever had. I would kill for more chapter 1. I always want videogames that establish setting this well to give me more of the mundane before bringing on the action. Homeworld, for example. I would love for Homeworld to have me go through more mundane tests and equipment checks and little calibrations and such before things get life-threatening. I appreciate having that stuff as a contrasting starting point at all! but I always want more of it. HL2 really, because, again, of that nice smooth ramp-up rather than an explosive event, does this starting point thing better than anything else I've seen, probably in any kind of medium, but still I just would like to see more of City 17 without being shot at.

That said, the level of detail throughout the game is exceptional. For instance, looking at things in Eli Vance's lab and that prompting him to comment is just wonderful. There are lots of little technology ideas like the teleporter with the cactus that you can send back and forth and the shard being exposed to laser that you can rotate, that's the same material as caused the resonance cascade scenario thingy in the first game. Lots of references to the first game. Putting the suit on and having the Valve music kick off was great.

I think one of the most impressive touches in both HL and HL2 is the sense of heroism applied to Gordon as his feats grow more remarkable. It's just written well, and you feel like you earned it. I'm talking about the remarks of your allies who seem to have heard so much about you or to expect so much of you or be so excited that you're around or whatever. More than that, though, it's the remarks of your adversaries. The first time you see "SURRENDER, FREEMAN!" written on a wall behind a marine encampment in the first HL is just a great moment. Then you start to hear them talking about you, using your name on the radio. In HL2, there's a sense that an entire revolutionary culture idolizes you. The lambda grafiti is meant to symbolize you. You get the sense that people whisper "Remember Black Mesa" like it was your Alamo. Breemer makes that broadcast warning people against joining your little cult of reputation. The whole thing just grows and grows, and I have never felt deservedly special in any other videogame, which is an important statement, I think, considering how many of games are about saving the world and such.

Also, did you guys notice the g-man in HL2? It's much harder to notice him in this bigger world -- although they place him so smartly as to be where you'd be looking! His appearances are actually helpful!

Anyway, my plan is to finish HL2, play Ep 1, then finish up Opposing Force and play Blue Shift, then play HL2 and Ep 1 again. I'll enjoy them even more the second time, because I won't be OCD about it.

That's all for now. I'll have more for you later.

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Um, I rented Curse of Darkness and, well, the thing is, I'm actually enjoying it like a million times more than I expected to. Which was very little. But a million times very little adds up to something that is actually noticeable. I am worried about myself.

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I invested 80-something hours in DQ8, and I can tell you that there's really no good reason to do so. Especially if you also have FF12.

So! Here are some impressions of the games I just bought!

Echo Night: Beyond isn't as artsy as I had hoped. The ghosts and their dialogue are a little too silly. But the setting and presentation are really good, and I only played for like twenty minutes to get a taste, so maybe it opens up a lot.

Shattered Soldier is great old-skool business. Not typically my thing, but it fills a niche, you know? I wish I hadn't watched a superplay of the full game once upon a time, because it basically spoiled a bunch of stuff. I can't say how often I'll find myself in the right mood to play this, but I'm glad I have it.

I played Odin Sphere a lot! I'm up to chapter 3! I'm in love with it! It's tight as hell. Everything about it is tight. It's essentially a group of very tight features that tie together really tightly to form something greater than the sum of its parts. There's the gorgeousness, of course: even the girl in the attic (Alice, I think her name is) is as charming as could be, and she's like, barely in the game. The item system, from alchemy to inventory management, is really constricting, which is actually great because it keeps you tactical and focused, unlike Final Fantasies in which I tend to stockpile and never use anything. I mean, I'm using attack potions! I never do that in other games. I just horde them forever. The combat system is tight. The character stats are tight. Even the way you only equip a single item is tight. And that contributes to the tightness of the inventory. Oh, and the story structure looks super tight. Before I quit, I checked the archive of story scenes, and they're organized in five columns for each of the five characters, but the individual entries are spaced out chronologically such that, for instance, your first character's first scene is like 1/10th down the very, very long chronology, and then there are small gaps, and then there are very long gaps and a couple more short gaps.... and throughout, both concurrent to her scenes and during her gaps, other characters have scenes. And gaps. And at the bottom of the chronology there's a gap for the whole structure, and then there's a separate, smaller structure in a different color, and all the characters have scenes tightly packed at each chronological unit, implying some kind of big get-together brou-ha-ha structurally different finale upheaval in which all the opposing good guys are friends against evil, which is pretty awesome. It will be especially, totally awesome if, like, Alice's role becomes important somehow. Like Neverending Story. Anyway, I'm very, very early in the game, and yet I can't imagine loving it more or being more excited than this. It's a really, really great game, and at a comparatively low price, and such a gift in the PS2's last real year of action.

I'm about to give Etrian Odyssey a real go. I read the manual and I'm excited as fuck about the map-making (no way in hell am I going to use auto-mapping), especially with the annotations. I intend to annotate every goddamn thing. It seems like it will be a way to kind of chronicle my own unique adventure stories, you know? Like, I could share this map with someone after playing and it would recount my glories. The only thing I'm not clear on is whether normal monsters are random or exist in fixed locations that are worth labeling; I'll figure it out, though.

It's pretty awesome that Atlus hit us with both EO and OS at, like, the same time. To someone with my tastes, they both seem like really significant releases, you know? I mean, I didn't even realize they were both by Atlus until after I had booted them both up. I don't buy games often, and I happened to buy both of these together just today. It's impressive as hell. I hope they do very well with them.

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Doom 3 takes a lot more from a comp than Half-Life 2, right?

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Oh wow. They so did not mention that in the manual. I've come close to getting my party wiped out at least twice, too!

I am absolutely loving this game. I'm only a little into B2F, but the self-made experience aspect is completely new and unique and amazing to me. I love that the writing so far has made me feel like we're really a group of new adventurers who had to learn the ropes and then prove themselves and now can take on real quests. I love how hard the game is. I love working on my map most of all. This is wonderful.

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Hmph! That sounds more like what achievements should be, if you ask me. Measuring your progress in a game, rather than proffering respect-up social rewards for nabbing every set of rare collectibles over two-hundred-plus hours.

I'm kind of making the assumption that the latter is how things usually are, since I don't have a 360 myself.

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What a blow to hear about Sim City. It seems like a sim game on the ds is such an obvious good idea, I have trouble understanding how they could have failed.

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Does anyone know if Izuna is any good? Or even out yet...? Just curious.

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Too bad. It would be nice to have a really good roguelike on the DS that I could make a serious effort with.

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It sounds great, but I'll never play it without a translation. It's a deal-breaker.

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Really a shame if nothing's in the works.

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Doesn't that mean that a translation of the apparently superior DS game would be a speedy process?

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I've been playing DoomRL lately. It's really fun! I think I could get a lot farther than I have so far; I can't help but go into that Arena > everytime and say "y" when the master of ceremonies asks if I want to continue another round. I feel compelled to see what the best reward I can get is. But I get killed each go on what I think is the final round (he says it's the last one, right?). Sometimes I get lucky and find a double-barreled or combat shotgun beforehand, but those cacodemons are a bitch. I decided quickly that Son of a Gun, which appeals to me because I find handgun proficiency graceful, is pretty useless since there is abundant ammo for heavier weapons. The chaingun is too wimpy, as well. So I've been Hellrunning and Son of a Bitching with shotguns.

The RL is definitely harder than real Doom, but it's a blast. Makes me look forward to getting access to Ultimate Doom on the old hard drive of my dead computer soon. Anyway, I hope I beat the Arena at some point so I can get on with the real game.

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I have always liked the first Turok game, but I couldn't say why. I think it's probably aesthetic more than anything else. But since this upcoming game looks to be a new beginning for the franchise, I'm hoping it goes well.

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Hm. I'd be curious to see experience/leveling/PC stat growth applied to an FPS in that way, especially in a cooperative context. I'm not sure if it would work, but if it did, it would make the coop dynamic more interesting by burgeoning reliance on skilled players.

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I'm looking forward to discovering very soon what PC multiplayer gaming has done in the past six years, certainly. But Deus Ex isn't what I had in mind, actually; I was thinking something much, much simpler, where you make your initial class choice or whatever and leveling up occurs automatically such that there is no stat screen or anything for the player to view. Rather, tangible aspects of aiming, movement speed, etc. are steadily improved. Ideally, level increments would be eliminated in favor of growing these hidden stats as corresponding actions are exercised by the player.

That's what I think of as an arcadey approach to RPG-like growth in an FPS.

Were you implying that Left 4 Dead has RPG features of some kind?

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Woah, that's like the opposite of what I figured Mass Effect was like. Well, I'm going to try it eventually, so we'll see.

I wonder why that sort of leveling pisses people off? Loss of direct control, perhaps? It seems logical to me, and I like how it would make people more conscientious of their play style and such.

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I've been playing Bioshock. Not much; but here and there. I'm in Neptune's Bounty, I just met Peach, and I'm about to go after the research camera. Aside from The Orange Box, this was my first purchase upon building a new computer, and I was really excited about it. But I'm very disappointed. I don't feel much drive to continue playing.

Everyone knows that Bioshock is all about its setting, and in some respects I am impressed there, but in other ways it has a plastic quality to it that grates on me. And it's too overblown. It lacks subtlety. An overarching example of this is the story of the city and what went wrong; considering its objectivist premise, I like that bandits emerged as a problem. What I don't like is the plasmids or the balls-out lunacy. It would be far better if all the freaks attacking me were just very selfish rather than mutated psychotics whom I myself am destined to join since absurdly stabbing myself with that first needle. I also find the writing stilted and contrived.

I hate the way things animate in this game, most of all my own hands. I don't enjoy the combat at all, including plasmid use. Everything feels loose and awkward, and I can see the different pieces of this PC game as separate parts. HL2, being my standard, feels so solid to play compared to this. Take telekinesis as an example. I can't put my finger on why or how, but it feels loose and weak compared to using the gravity gun, even though they're exactly the same thing.

I don't know what my issue is, really. It's a lot of small things that add up. I was looking forward to this to show off my hardware and give me an immersive philosophical horror experience as with SS2, but I barely feel any drive to continue.

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I just finished MINERVA. Six hours of Holy Shit Awesome.

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Aside from Harvest/Rescue, there's nothing I could really describe about the game that would make it clear that it's mediocre, I think. It's more an overall feel. For example, I had no idea until I played this how important it is to me for there to be some attempt to walk-bob or move the held weapon around when looking around. This game feels like it's ten years old; I'm just a camera again. I feel totally disembodied. And compounding this is the lightweight feel of every weapon and plasmid you use. Nothing has weight or solidity. It's actually been pretty educational for me to experience this disappointment because I had taken these things for granted to an extent.

And like I mentioned the writing seems quite hammy to me. I'm playing on hard with vita-chambers turned off, but I still know they're there, and the game is very gamey either way for many small reasons. Hunting big daddies might not have fixed this, but if they were the only foes in the game it would have been far better. This place lacks an essential loneliness, and the quiet of solitude coupled with that terrific long moaning of a big daddy in the distance could have been something good.

It seems to me that lights going out and you being attacked from all sides when you pick up a new weapon is more important to this game than any of its writing or exploration, and that's tragic for a Shock game. How many decades ago was DooM now?

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I just wanted to post briefly to say that I beat CoD4 recently. I played on Hardened difficulty, which I clearly see as a mistake. Throughout the second half of the game, I found myself exceedingly frustrated by the impossibility of progressing in the face of the enormous waves of enemies CoD games have always been built upon. There were missions I thought I would never get past, like the one where you have to hold out for like ten minutes while waiting for the evac from Pripyat or the one called Heat where you have to move back down through that village under a tight timeframe with everyone trying to kill you--about half of them using RPGs. It's absurd. 3/4 difficulty level should be challenging, not impossible. I found my experience of the story and the adventure stuttering because of the hold-ups caused by the difficulty, and so I greatly look forward to going back and playing again on normal.

That said, I did enjoy the story a great deal, and a few scenes were particularly great, including [SPOILERS HERE]: moving through Pripyat towards your sniping position, the mission before the nuclear strike when you use the chopper's guns while in the air and go back for the pilot, the early mission when you have to save Nikolai and that Russian Sgt. keeps sidetracking you to fight his battle for him, and the climax of the final mission, when things are slow-mo and Price slides you the pistol. And then he dies, and I think Griggs gets shot in the head. Don't remember if Gaz made it. But the point is those guys worked as characters. I also really enjoyed the quick mission after the credits.

Some things disappointed me. For example, I had read on Rock Paper Shotgun that you experience in the first-person a slow death from radiation poisoning. I built this up in my mind to be a long, slow process involving bleeding out of my eyes and shit. The reality was a huge disappointment; you really just die from the result of being in a horrible chopper crash, and the experience is one of slowly crawling several feet and expiring. Now, it was a good scene, but I was busy feeling let down. This is another reason why I look forward to playing the game again.

Ultimately, CoD4 is interesting to me because it adopts the Half-Life style of consistent-mode presentation, applies it to new situations, and has the balls to employ a totally different (and very unusual) narrative structure--and it works. Now, if you had to ask me to state a preference, I'd still say that HL2 is more valuable to me, partially because of the consistent shoes you fill and the lack of level breaks. It's a more stable and thus real world and role. But CoD4 achieves different things that ultimately provide you with a much larger-scoped view of the proceedings, and this is a pretty uncommon success for a videogame whose gameplay perspective is not that of a god or at least a satellite. It really comes down to those cinematic load screens and switching between characters and warfronts. So--and I'm saying this for the third time now--I really look forward to playing the game on normal difficulty and attaining a more uninterrupted overall experience. And it's sort of an interesting issue in itself that the interruption of challenge and death is a real problem here, isn't it?

I'm also halfway through STALKER. I'm using the Rebalanced mod. It's my favorite game ever. Well, no, because I can't ever say that This One is better than the other Great Ones I love, but it's on The List. And that's a funny thing because the game only goes halfway in so many respects. It's very much like an MMO experience for single-player because of the mission structure, which bothers me intellectually and ideologically despite my enjoyment (FFXII's great hunts made me feel the same way). The social aspects of the game leave really quite a lot to be desired; conversation is extremely limited, NPCs are mostly interchangeable, and the economy is weak. Factions are thin; bandits don't really make sense in several respects as a faction; kill-on-sight or don't-kill-on-sight is a really oversimplified approach to interpersonal and group attitude; and there's no sense of progression because your buddies aren't smart enough to take over the compound that you just emptied of enemies before reinforcements show up, much less make use of structural fortifications (god damn it, if you would just repair that ladder this tower here would make a beautiful sniping and watch post).

The game basically would be better off and more exciting if it were tweaked either for better NPCs or for better loneliness. It's caught in the middle of these two extremes as-is. For an example of the possibilities inherent in the lonelier extreme, take a good look at this post on the GSC forums. Yes, it starts off with fanfic basically, but it's a very good read--the fanfic is there to illustrate the gameplay experience that the writer has in mind. I would love to play his version of Stalker.

As it is, though, Stalker is still an extremely compelling experience. The weapons and gunplay are better than anything I've experienced in more overtly shooty FPS games, including the likes of BLACK and CoD4; I attribute this to the much-maligned inaccuracy of the weapons, as well as the tangibility provided by their inventoried context, customizability, etc. The game's setting is magnificent in its detail and atmosphere. It's very inspiring. And of course, the experience of moving throughout that world relatively freely, setting your own goals and destinations, is absolutely key. But the set pieces are fabulous, as well--the last major thing I've done, lab X18, is a scarier experience than Silent Hill, I swear.

So I'm really into it. I love the experience of having progressed in terms of my equipment and how it empowers me. Crouching in a warehouse at night, fighting off the Ukrainian military with an AN-94 equipped with scope and silencer and using my generation 1 night vision, I think briefly about what I was capable of back in the Cordon, getting my ass kicked by bandits, and that's the same kind of feeling as I get when I scroll through the map in MGS3 and remember the variety of landscape I've traversed and the adventure that implies. It's a romance.

Note to fans: I have and will continue to post in the Stalker thread at TGQ, so keep an eye there if you're interested. I expect that I'll be playing the game at least a few times through eventually, and I want to experiment with mods. I may even take a stab at modding the game myself.