MGS2: Substance

I finished MGS2: Substance last night. Time to start on MGS3.

Video Game Awards?

For some reason unknown to me, Spike TV hosts some annual farce called the Video Game Awards. Why they think they're qualified enough to host it, we'll probably never know. In any case, Spike TV's VGAs are nothing but the breeding grounds for bringing stupidity to the gaming industry. On second thought, they bring more stupidity. Half of the awards are for rewarding "good work" to members of the Screen Actors Guild - the group that bitched and whined for more undeserved money for their half-assed performances in our video games.

I'd like all the publishers in the industry to know that I hate 99% of the English voice acting in video games. They suck. A user's experience can be single-handedly ruined by the crappy performances they give due to their lack of understanding the emotion of the moment in the game. Yes, some games have wonderful English voice acting, most notably the Metal Gear Solid series. But other games, Final Fantasy X comes to mind for its horrible "laughing scene", just don't seem like anyone gave a rat's ass. What I'd really like in all of our games is the option to use the originating language instead of English. While I wouldn't have any idea what the hell they characters are saying, at least I'd get the correct emotion from the speech (assumingly) to go along with the text on screen.

But I'm off topic...

There's another thing I hate about awards or top ten lists. There are a lot of categories that seem to exist only to justify giving a popular game an award. In other cases, it seems like Xbox related material has to be mentioned at least once whether the point was valid or not. Most notably, in this IGN article stating the Top Ten Controller Innovations and 1up.com's Top Ten reasons why the Xbox 360 won't be the next Dreamcast.

IGN's article is riddled with errors. The error that pisses me off the most is that reason #8 fails to mention that the Sega Saturn 3D-pad had trigger buttons before the Dreamcast. My real problem with that top ten list is #7. Breakaway cords are just stupid and they have no effect on the way the user interacts with the game.

For 1up.com's article, #7 makes it obvious that a fanboy made the list. The Dreamcast has a lot of awesome games, but it sucked because it doesn't have Halo 3. But Xbox 360 owners are lucky, cause they're gonna have the awesome Halo 3! Oh by the way, if you didn't know, Halo sucks major ass.

Halo is one of those games where people think it's the best thing ever - when it's initially released. Given enough time, people will realize that it didn't age well. A perfect example of this is Donkey Kong Country, made by Rare who was owned by Nintendo at the time. When DKC first came out everyone thought it kicked ass. Nearly ten years later, we're seeing it being re-released on the GBA. Let me tell you, time was not kind to this "gem" at all. I cannot believe I actualy found this game fun.

Games like Halo and DKC are remembered not for their gameplay nor for their story, they're remembered for their graphics. People always misunderstand me when I say that graphics don't matter (and I say this all the time). Yes, graphics are the first thing the consumer sees and usually what sells the game. But pretty graphics are just that - a selling point. Games can be played and enjoyed no matter how good the graphics are. If the developer makes their game enjoyable enough, the user will be happy with whatever graphics are used. Can you honestly say that your #1 favorite game is because of its graphics? If so, then you're not a gamer at all.

Metal Gear week

Since the gamecard on my WoW account expired, I decided to take some time off from the timesink so I could finish up some of the other games in my library that I've been meaning to get to. One of those games is the entire Metal Gear Solid series (except for the PS1 version of MGS). The only game that I haven't really played is MGS3. As for MGS2 and MGS: Twin Snakes, I never played them per se, but I did watch my friends play them from start to finish. And if you're wondering, both times were a single segment run. MGS2 took my friend about 14 hours and MGS:TT took my other friend about 8 hours. I tried to stay awake through both, but sometimes I just couldn't keep my eyes open. Now that I'm playing them myself, I'm sure to be awake.

Unless I get distracted by some other game (Final Fantasy IV Advance) I should be able to finish all 3 this week. Then I can start playing Prince of Persia: Two Thrones.

As time goes by

So I'm a year older today. What have I learned in the past year? Outside of video game related knowledge, practically nothing. Working at EA this past year, I did learn a lot about game design solely by being forced to sit through genres I normally would never play. Who knows if I'll ever get to use that knowledge.

Oh, I also learned what it's like to own a $250 paperweight. It's clear that Sony had no idea what they were competing against when they designed the PSP. What's the mindset you have to be in, in order to actually think that people would be willing to pay $30 for a movie on UMD - keeping in mind that the UMD movie has less extra features and costs more than a DVD of the same movie.

Anyway, I'm getting old real fast. I suppose it's time to start thinking about settling down and start a family of my own. Is a job in the video game industry stable enough to carry all of that? Maybe not. That probably explains why I haven't been searching for industry jobs lately and going back to my programming roots. I'd love to stay in the industry and reach my goals for game design, but maybe it'll take too long and it isn't financially good enough. Or maybe that's just my parents nagging that's stuck in the back of my head.

As my girlfriend says, "choose a career that you enjoy and the money will follow later." And I always tell her, "it's hard to do that with constant nagging by parents."

Best Auction Ever

Lot's of people try to sell Xbox 360s on eBay for profit, including this dumbass. He thought it'd be cool to include tickets to a local sporting event and make even more cash. Well, the plan backfired and the auction ended at $80 - because that's the maximum price allowed for resale tickets in Kentucky. Lesson learned, if you're gonna scalp tickets do it offline and if you're gonna sell an Xbox 360, just sell the stupid Xbox 360. To the buyer, grats on your awesome purchase. To the seller, it really sucks to be you.

Thanks to Rob for pointing me to this article.

The Soul Still Burns (and not in a good way)

Apparently it is possible for the Soul Calibur 3 savefile to become corrupted. From what I've read, it occurs when you delete, move, or update a savefile that was made previous to the SC3 savefile. Here is Namco's official response. Basically, that means once you save a SC3 game, you can't play another game if you don't want your SC3 data to become corrupt. That's just stupid.

Having worked in the testing division of the game industry I can see why it got overlooked. I would have never thought that deleting a savefile would affect another game's savefile. I do remember seeing something similar at work (Eron may remember what I'm referring to), but it was nothing close to this. IMO, there's a really stupid/sloppy programmer working on the Project Soul team at Namco Japan. The tip-off should have been that the game autosaves after every single versus battle. UGH!

I'm not so much concerned about the SC3 data on my memory card. If that gets corrupted it's no big deal - at least to me. I'm more concerned about the other data on my memory card. There's countless hours of gaming saved on that memory card and I'd be seriously pissed if SC3 caused it all to become corrupt.

It reminds me of a previous incident about savefile deletion. Earlier this year, the Viewtiful Joe 2 demo on the OPM demo disc would delete the saved data off the memory card in slot 1. Who knows why a demo has to access the memory card. But for whatever reason, it severely pissed off a lot of people.

Needless to say, I'm kinda scared to play SC3 now.

---

Penny Arcade agrees with me...

They think Perfect Dark Zero sucks ass,

And that Arcane Missiles don't work at all. (I told the guys at work this, but no one believed me. Maybe if they actually played mages.)

Although, I don't agree with PA about Killer Instinct. That series just needs to stay dead.

Colossal Viral Marketing

As we all know, I've been looking for Shadow of the Colossus stuff lately. I find it sad that Sony isn't doing more to getting more gamers interested in SotC. To the naked eye, there's only the print ad which appears in various gaming magazines. In an earlier post, I showed you a video of a discovery of a colossus-like creature in the snow. That video is apparently a part of Sony's viral marketing campaign for SotC. The videos are fun to watch and should be checked out if you're a fan of SotC. All videos, etc. of this campaign are conveniently located at a blog about Giantology. (view posts from Oct. and Nov. 2005)

Finally, I found the preview/concept trailer for NICO, which is what SotC was called during its development. This trailer was taken from the NICO DVD was provided to people who preordered SotC in Japan. Enjoy!

And yes, I'm looking for the full DVD.

Star Wars AND Transformers?!

If you know me, you'll know that I'm a big Star Wars fan. If you really know me, you'll know that I'm a huge Transformers collector. Well, not so much anymore. But I still enjoy getting a nice rare Transformers item now and then. Much to my amazement, there's a new line of Transformers coming out that are Star Wars based. Obi-Wan looks pretty stupid imo since the toy doesn't even look anything like Obi-Wan. Grevious looks the most like the movie character. I'll probably pick up Vader and Grevious whenever I see them.

I've also been looking for the Shockblast figure from the Alternator line of Transformers. They just don't seem to carry it in the stores near me. Kinda sucks since I'd rather not order it online.

Lazy Dumbass Finger Pointers

Politicians suck ass. "OMG! There's violence, sexuality, racism, and religious themes in video game! We must protect the children! Oh why doesn't someone think about the children!" Hey guys, all that stuff is in the movie theatres, television, radio, and printed media. Oh and there's that little thing called the Internet. Why just blame video games? Why punish just us? It's not our fault today's parents have no control over their children.

Just today at the mall, this one lady's kid (maybe 6 or so) was running around, bumping into people and making a mess. For 5 minutes, while I was waiting in line for my food, the kid never stopped moving nor once shut the hell up. All the mother did was say "stop that." I mean, wow. That's awesome parenting. I can tell right now that that kid is gonna be a failure at school. Congratulations lady, your kid is yet another idiot bogging down the schools for everyone else.

Anyway, my point is that parents should point the blame at themselves for failing their children, not video games or any other media. Yes, media has a heavy influence. But the parent has the ultimate power to restrict that media in the home.

How can I put this in a way that you'd understand it...

You see, Anakin was a promising padawan. He had all the potential in the world to become the greatest Jedi Master. Yet, the Jedi council, and more directly, Obi-wan didn't take heed to restrict Anakin from falling in love with Padme nor restrict Anakin talking with Senator Palpatine. They weren't the parents, or teachers, that Anakin needed to focus his abilities. They let him roam free to do as he pleased. The only discipline Anakin got was "mind your feelings, they betray you." Yeah, that really taught him a lesson. We all know how the rest of the story goes.

Left on the cutting room floor

I found a couple of interesting facts about Shadow of the Colossus. Apparently, the designers initially planned for there to be over 40 colossi in the game. Given that there are only 16 in the game (with an 8 hour average play time), 40 colossi would have been really amazing. If you think about it though, the game might have suffered with that many colossi. Time and money constraints rule above all in the game industry. Keep in mind, SotC took roughly 4 years to make. To make the game as unique as it is, not to mention make 40 unique colossi, would have taken the development team at least 6 or so years to do. I'm happy with the way SotC is, and so should you. We could always hope for a director's cut edition. =)

Here are some pics of colossi that were cut out of the final game.



Here's a picture of the 3rd colossus in his prefinal in-game-model. Note the much thicker armor.


Here's a preview trailer that shows some of the left out colossi. I wonder why they were left out of the game when they seemed to already have AI, models, etc. already completed.

Finally, here's a post on GameFAQs that ties (or tries to) SotC to the Bible. While GameFAQs may not be the best source for acurate information, it still is interesting to read.

Needless to say, I'm having fun searching for info about this game.

edit: Here's Wikipedia's entry for Shadow of the Colossus. (note: severe spoilers ahead)

Xbox Gamer Profile

Ignore the Xbox360 Gamer Profile link that's on this blog. If you click on it, you'll be able to see that I don't play any Xbox360 games. I just thought it'd be neat to have on my blog though.

It's a feature that I wish Blizzard would do for their games. I could link to my WoW characters, for example, and any interested person would be able to see how I spec'd that character and see what equipped items that character has. Hell, they could just unify all the logins for all of their games and then have a link to your win-loss records. Or even maybe have a smal database of StarCraft or WarCraft III replays! That'd be freaking awesome!

Shadow of the Colossus (video game heaven)

Having completed SotC over the weekend (freaking awesome ending, btw), I've been looking for videos on the Internet that are SotC related. Here's a strange one. I'll post more when I find them.

Now to beat Hard mode. =)

Here are some speed runs (note, severe spoiler alert):
1st Colossus
2nd Colossus
3rd Colossus (link to a tutorial)
4th Colossus
5th Colossus
6th Colossus
7th Colossus
8th Colossus
9th Colossus
10th Colossus
11th Colossus

Insanity!

So the Xbox 360 is finally here. Whoopie. Woohoo. Huzzah. So, are all of those who actually got one happy with your $400+ purchase? If not, you should feel "lucky" that you were actually able to get one. You should also thank the stars that you weren't robbed. Of course, if you're a rich bastard, you don't have to worry about such things and just buy it off eBay.

However, if you were an intelligent person, you'd at least wait until the PlayStation 3 launches and then buy an Xbox 360 at a lower price. I bet you that the games would no longer be $60 by that time too.

On the other hand, the PS3 should be pretty sweet. I mean c'mon, aren't you just dying to play games that you've haven't played since the days of the PS1? This time they're prettier. Oooooohhh.. Pretty bump mapping, sharp textures, the curves of the hundred million polygons... I just can't wait for new gripping styles of gameplay like what MGS4 will offer. Surely it won't be like MGS1, MGS2, or MGS3. Let's hope it plays like MGA!!! That's worth the $450+ price of the console.

Me personally, I'm waiting for Nintendo. Sure, I have absolutely no idea what the console offers. Other than a remote control wand. Sure as hell would make Star Wars or Harry Potter games more fun. Well, okay... just the Star Wars games.

All in all, I'm sure Microsoft is damn happy with their launch. But hey, if you're dying to get your hands on an Xbox 360 this Christmas. Why don't you import one from Japan? They'll have plenty of 360s to sell.

Hmm... let's call this segment: Insanity Part 2.

So I watched the video review for Perfect Dark Zero this morning. And I have to say... the game looks like garbage. Is it just me, or is the bump mapping for the game totally fucked up? I've seen better bump mapping in Halo 2. Freaking Halo 2! What a rush job. It'a also amazing how poorly rendered the hair is in PDZ. Especially when in their most recent games (Conker: Live and Uncut and Star Fox Adventures) hair and fur are rendered insanely. What went wrong? Who knows. All I know is that yet again Perfect Dark is just around to copy a previous FPS (this time it's Halo 2).

Finally, I'd just like to say that, for video reviews, it should be a requirement that the person demonstrating the game during the review should know how to play the game. The idea should be to show the game at its best and that cannot be done by watching a bumbling fool attempt to play the game. Oh, it'd also be nice if what is being talked about by the reviewer is shown on screen by the demonstrator. Just a thought...

Woohoo! My first epic item!

This afternoon, I looted my first epic item in WoW, The Eye of Shadow. Now I only need The Eye of Divinity and the Splinter of Nordrassil so I can form Benediction/Anathema. Needless to say, that staff kicks serious ass. More Molten Core tonight!

Quality - It's in the game

I recently started playing City of Villains. I wanted to try City of Heroes when it first came out, but decided that if I'm going to pay monthly for a game it had better be a Blizzard game. City of Villains, so far, is no World of WarCraft - it's not even close to the quality of WoW.

Blizzard has really spoiled the MMO genre with WoW. There are so many minute details in the game design that you wouldn't notice unless you played one of the competition's games. You know, something like not having to select the server where your character is located everytime you load the game. And on top of that, displaying how many characters you have created for a given server. Simple stuff like that makes WoW so much better than every other MMO.

This takes me back to a previous post on my blog. Blizzard takes their damn sweet time when developing a game. And it shows. Even as you read this, Microsoft is in a rush to get every launch title ready for the Nov. 22 release of the Xbox360. To them, it doesn't matter how good the game is, just get it out there.

Perfect Dark Zero is Microsoft's flagship title. I can tell you right now, it's gonna suck ass. No, I haven't seen it in person or played a demo. I've only seen the screenshots that you have seen. Why do I think it'll suck? One reason. Microsoft has not yet allowed game reviewer sites, like GameSpot or IGN, to even play a pre-final version of the game. If a title skips the reviewers before being released, the publisher is very concerned over the reviews the game will get. Movie companies do this all the time. Microsoft is scared shitless that the game will get bombed by reviewers and thus PDZ would only sell to the really stupid. Microsoft could always use an excuse like "we didn't have enough time to get the game to reviewers before launch because the games couldn't be pressed in time." That, of course, is a lie. Game companies will normally send the reviewers pre-final software (before mass production begins).

Perfect Dark Zero will sell, no doubt. People just have not learned why Nintendo got rid of Rare in the first place. Rare just sucks. Out of all the games they developed, only GoldenEye for the N64 is worth playing. Sure, Conker is a favorite of mine. But by no means is it a good game - it's just entertaining enough to overlook the huge flaws in gameplay design. Granted, I've said this many times before and I know people still don't believe me. Hey, it's your time and money. Waste it if you want. Just remember I told you so.

I've also been playing a lot of Mario Kart DS - offline and online. The mix of race tracks from the previous 4 Mario Kart games is nice, although it does show how crappy Mario Kart: Double Dash is compared to the rest. And while an online Battle mode will surely be missed, racing online is just too damn cool. It just sucks that there's no penalty for disconnecting from a race. It's something that must be fixed in future online games from Nintendo. And yes, Mario Kart DS is the best Mario Kart ever.

Backwards Crapability

Microsoft finally released the list of Xbox games that will initially be playable on the Xbox 360. Thank god that Catwoman is on that list and not crap like Panzer Dragoon Orta or Project Gotham Racing. (end sarcasim)

What the hell is this broken backwards compatibility shit? Either you have backwards compatibility, or you don't. You don't give us this half assed approach.

Trickling the supply of the Xbox 360 to generate demand is a lame approach too.

I'm waiting for Nintendo's Revolution and Sony's PS3. Screw the Xbox 360.

Disappointing news

Couple of disappointing news items today. Mario Kart DS' online mode does not support Battle Mode. That seriously sucks major ass. I was really looking forward to playing that mode online. Mario Kart racing is fun, but was never as much fun as battle mode.

The other news item is that the creator of Katamari Damacy may soon stop making games. Yet again, the bottom line is more important than actually making games that are fun.

As if it weren't cool enough

I just found this video of one guy's method for climbing to the 3rd Colossus' head. Very cool indeed. Now, where are the speed runs?

Thy next foe is...

I've been playing a lot of Shadow of the Colossus lately. We all know that this game kicks serious ass and is definitely the PS2's best game ever. My question is why don't more companies give development teams more time to perfect their games? Sony's had two gems this year, those being God of War and Shadow of the Colossus. Both games had a development time of roughly 4 years. Other companies, such as EA, have much shorter development cycles - roughly 6-9 months from concept to retail. Far too short in my opinion.

Don't get me wrong here... I'm all for making cheap games to sell to idiots. Those morons keep the industry out of the red. I just want more gems in a given year.

Exciting times

I can't wait for November 14th. Mario Kart goes online on that day. I've always enjoyed Mario Kart - not for it's racing but more for it's multiplayer battle mode. I remember that my friends and I would spend an entire day just playing the 4 battle mode stages in Mario Kart 64. Those were the days. Even though Mario Kart: Double Dash really disappointed me, I have high hopes for Mario Kart DS. I just wish that more of my friends owned a NintendoDS so that we could all join in on the fun. Oh well, I suppose that WoW and Civilization IV will have to suffice for now. They'll cave in and buy a NDS soon enough. =)

Come Nov. 14th, I challenge everyone to Mario Kart!!!

Especially you. Yes, you. You know who you are...