John's Random Review

Recently, film critic Roger Ebert said (again!) that “video games can never be art.”  He has obviously never played Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  It was one of the best games i’ve ever played.  If I’m not going to say it was the best i’ve ever played, because it did have some repetitive things and some other weird issues.  But this game is art.  There’s no way it can’t be.  As much as I respect Roger Ebert, he’s just plain wrong on this one.

The voice acting was probably the best in any game I’ve ever played. The story was pretty good, part tomb raider, part Indiana Jones (minus the aliens).  The story telling was awesome.  The transitions between “chapters” and sections was great.  It really did feel like a movie that i was in control of.  There’s a PS3 commercial that makes fun of it looking like a movie, and when i started playing Laura even asked what i was watching, because she didn’t think it was a game.

Some kinda spoilers, so…the font’s going white on white background here, so highlight it to read it.  not sure what RSS feeds and/or facebook will do with this, but I’d presume you’ll see it…

potential spoilers:

What the hell is up with going through all these puzzles that nobody else has ever figured out only to find that a bunch of nazi’s got here before and left all their ammo with their dead bodies?  and its all still good?  yeah.

Or i have to figure out some complicated puzzle, and it just opens a frigging window so i can see somewhere else, and that area’s out in the open and bad dudes are already  over there looking for a secret entrance?

And why is everything all rickety, but the badguys can just walk over there?   As soon as a good guy wants to go there, stuff starts falling apart!?

And what is with train scenes?  don’t bad guys know you just unhook the cars you don’t need? Why do the bad guys always take trains?

My biggest complaint is about load times before the game even starts. Why do games these days take a full minute to get to the actual game?  when you start uncharted 2, you see an empty black screen for 5+ seconds, then like 15 seconds of a spinning dagger.  Then it shows you the logo for the developer.  Press start a few times, and you wait for it to load with that spinning dagger again!  Thankfully, once you actually start playing, you never see that stupid dagger in that context again.  Load times pretty much disappear, or are invisible to you because they’re happing during cut-scenes that you actually are interested in seeing.

I was tempted to bring down my NES and a little TV, put in Mike Tyson’s Punch-out and see if i turned them both on at the exact same time, could i enter the code to jump to Tyson (it has been burned into my muscle memory since i was in like 6th grade) and beat him before i could actually play in game in Uncharted 2  Some games, like the call of duty series, have always been awesome about that.  there’s little or no waiting, you can skip through all of the title screens, etc. you press A a few times and you’re loading or matchmaking in multiplayer.  Valve (Half life, Left 4 Dead, etc) is always one of the worst offenders on this. why the hell do you waste a minute of my life loading some animated 3d scene to show in the background of the title screen that i’m only going to see for 2 seconds before i press start?!?

While in Arizona for spring training, my step-dad Art took my brother and me to the Ben Avery Shooting Facility outside of Phoenix.

Here’s the panorama view from where we were sitting. I should have gotten a couple more shots to the left, though!

Here’s the view from space:

The main 200 yard range is just eastnortheast a bit of where the orange dot is on the map. If you zoom in you can see what 200 yards looks like from space. Then zoom back out and see HOW HUGE that place is! It was awesome! Weather was nice, not too warm, not too cold. A little windy, but not so much that it really affected us at the distance we were shooting.

We went on St. Patrick’s day, and expected it to not be very busy. Boy were we wrong! (and boy am i slow finally getting this post up!) We had to wait for a while before we got a lane (originally we were hoping to get a lane each), but that gave Jimbo and I some time to soak it all in and see what was going on. The range masters were all business. There were rules, and rules were followed. Even 6 weeks later, i can still remember the rules they kept repeating during every cease fire, which occurred every 15 minutes. It was basically 15 minutes shooting, then 15 minutes with the range cold to check + move targets (but stay away from the benches. hey, you! move away from the bench. HEY! YOU, YEAH YOU! away from the bench during cease fire!)

We shot a whole bunch of revolvers in .22, .22 mag, .38 special, and .357 magnum, then bolt and lever rifles in .22 mag, 30-30, and a .308 autoloader. I’ve never been much of a revolver guy, but i really liked the .357 mag revolver. The smaller revolvers just seemed like they had too small of a grip for my hands. my hands aren’t huge or anything, but i just couldn’t get a comfortable grip on the smaller guns.

All in all it was a pretty awesome day at the range, even with the wait. Hopefully it will become another yearly tradition when we go down to AZ for spring training!

Just finished the game G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra on Xbox 360.  The idea of the game was good.  The execution was rather….meh.

The game is kindof a 3rd person top down/isometric shooter.  but you have absolutely no control over the camera!  In most of the games like this you have at least some control over the camera.  you might not be able to rotate the full 360 degrees, but at least you can move it so you can see your characters on the frigging screen!  there were several places in the game where you had to make a left or right turn to go around the corner.  and for several seconds, you couldn’t even see your characters until the camera caught up with you!  That’s just insane.  Instead of having the right thumbstick control the camera, it controlled what you were targeting.  I would have much rather had camera control and then use the left/right bumpers for target control.

It had lots of Joe characters, so that was cool, but there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between them.  There were 3 classes: soldier (standard run and gun), commando (fast+weak/melee), and heavy (slower but more powerful weapon).  all of the characters had some kind of special attack, like grenades or stun or something, but some of the special attacks were not very useful.  Snake-eyes is pretty much everyone’s favorite character, and you unlock him rather early, but he wasn’t super effective.

There were also special doors throughout the game that only one of those classes could unlock, so it was generally good to have 2 different classes for the two different players you could control in any mission.  I generally used a heavy and a soldier, as the commandos’ weapons were pretty useless.  If you ran into a door that needed a commando, usually there was a device nearby that would let you swap out a character, so that wasn’t generally a big deal.

The voice acting was pretty meh, the cutscenes were ok, the story was ok, the achievements were reasonable.  The game was pretty linear, with some (but not much) choice of which missions to do in what order.  But what missions in what order didn’t really have any impact on the story or the game or anything.

I know it is a remake that goes along with the new movies, but i would have much rather had a little more cartoony game like the original cartoons were.

I really liked the first Ultimate Alliance, and the sequel fixed almost every problem/annoyance that i had with it. Ultimate Alliance 2 was, in a word: Awesome.

It’s a top-down action game with RPG elements, reasonable multiplayer, and comic book heroes (and villains!) galore. It has a good story with a great moral dilemma, which is (mostly) meaningful to the story. The pace of the game was good, the story was really good.

I played as spidey most of the game (who wouldn’t?) until the second playthrough, where I did a lot of the game as Thor.  I almost always had Wolverine in my party, and the 4th was pretty random, to try out most of the other characters. 

I only had two problems with the game:

1. I never unlocked Hulk, one of my favorite characters. And hulk was the ONLY character i didn’t unlock. I played through the game twice, once on my true choice of anti-registration, and then once on "super hard" as the pro-reg side to get all the story achievements. But i never found all the things you need to unlock hulk, and i didn’t want to go back through every chapter to figure out what i missed.
2. the downloadable content was only available for a very limited time (November 5th through December 31, 2009. Apparently, Activation’s licensing agreement with Marvel expired at the end of 2009, so they had to stop offering it? Lame.

My biggest complaints with the first one were that you could only save at certain locations, and that you could also only revive/swap teammates at certain locations. This game fixed the save issue mostly. You could save at any time, but depending on where you saved, you might load back at an earlier checkpoint (but with all of your stats/etc saved). You could swap in and out other characters whenever you wanted, which was cool, and you could heal/revive anyone as long as you had a healing token, and you could have up to 2, so that was fair.

It seemed like there were much less CGI in this one compared to the first, though. Which was good in a way: While playing through the first one years ago, my xbox was having disc read issues, and this was before you could copy games to the hard drive. Marvel was one of the worst offenders…I’d get through a section, it would load up the CGI, then disc read error and back to the dashboard I’d go. And of course, all of the save points were AFTER the cut scenes, so i had to replay almost every chapter and then pray i could get the thing to load before it would fail. I played the whole game almost twice just to finish it once.

The conversation system was a little more meaningful this time too, instead of just being snarky like i always did with Spiderman, you always had 3 options, aggressive, diplomatic, and defensive, and answering certain ways unlocked things, so that was cool.

I liked the equipment options you had in the first one, but you always ran out of inventory space and couldn’t get the things you wanted, so the “boost” system in the sequel was simpler, but much easier to manage.

I loved in the original when you could get weird conversation pairs, like Dr. Doom talking to himself.  There was a little of that in this version, but i didn’t see any related achievements like the original had.

All in all, a great game.  There haven’t been many games that I’ve played through multiple times, but i think this might have been the best of them!

During March, Laura and I hit two restaurants as part of the Dine Around Seattle program. From March 1 to March 31, a bunch of Seattle area restaurants do a Sunday through Thursday, 3 course for $30 special offer. Some of the places are pretty high end that you might never go to. Thankfully we found a good babysitter, so we’ve been able to go to two! If we hadn’t gone to AZ on spring break, we might have hit more!

Barking Frog, Woodinville

Barking Frog is located near the wineries and Red Hook brewery in Woodinville. The Herbfarm and Barking Frog are both located in theWillows Lodge hotel area. We went for Laura’s birthday. Everything we had was great, and service was too. Laura had the prawns as her first course, and she devoured them. She thought they were awesome, and could have eaten several more plate fulls as a meal. I had the steak tartare, which was also awesome. We both had the pork short ribs for dinner, and both loved it. For dessert, laura had the Pear and Ice cream, and I had the molten chocolate cake. perfecto! The pace of the meal was a little slow, but we kindof expected that. In places like this they aren’t in a rush to get you out and seat the next group While normally a little expensive, we’ll probably go back for a special occasion. We’re also thinking about staying at Willows lodge hotel as a little stay-cation!

Eva, Seattle

Eva Restaurant and Winebar is located in Seattle (probably technically in the Wallingford neighborhood?). We went for no special reason, other than that we wanted to hit another dine around Seattle restaurant and we had a willing babysitter, which is good enough reason, I guess! This time i had the prawns for my first course, and laura had the baby beets salad. I’m not much of a seafood person, but i thought the prawns were great. They were a little spicy, which probably helped for me. The beet salad was interesting, because it had baby beets that were orange, and blood oranges that were…well, beet red! For the main course, Laura went with the vegetarian option, asparagus and goat cheese crepes with hazelnut pesto, and I had the pork tenderloin. Laura, in summing up the crepes:

Do you think it’s okay if I lick the plate?

The tenderloin was good, you could really smell and taste the thyme. Laura set up a little herb garden a few years ago, so we always have fresh thyme, and there’s no mistaking it! For a fancier restaurant, the portions were pretty big at Eva. For dessert, Laura actually broke up her 3 for 30 dinner so she could get a dessert that wasn’t on the 3 for 30 menu. She’d kinda planned it that way by going with the vegetarian option, as the vegetarian 3 for 30 is actually $25 instead. In fact, she’d even picked Eva because of the dessert, or more correctly, 3 desserts in one, the “Eva Trio”; Meyer Lemon Ice Cream, Maple Pot de Crème with Walnut Praline, and a Saffron Panna Cotta with Watermelon–Rose Jelly. I went with the apricot sour cream coffee cake. All were delicious. the coffee cake was HUGE!

We can’t help but recommend the dine around seattle deals, when they restart them. Or, if you hurry, there’s still a couple days left! It lets you get out on non busy day and get a great deal in some great places. We’d go broke if they did it all the time, though! There are at least a few restaurants on the list that we’re going to hit regardless of the deal, but if we can go to them twice, once on the cheap, even better!

The first few hours were very enjoyable, much like the first Overlord was. I didn’t see much new stuff, other than that the minions could have mounts that would let them get to other places. I really liked the original Overlord, and in fact while i was playing it, Laura was pregnant with Easton. In one of laura’s first ultrasounds, easton looked just like the overlord, so that was funny timing. But the new spider mount feature for the green minions is one of the reasons i stopped playing….

I generally don’t “give up” on games after several hours of gameplay. I might give up in less than an hour if i know right away that this game just isn’t my style, like Supreme Commander (never been an RTS guy) or Mirrors Edge (first-person jumping-puzzle game). If i make it through the first hour, i will probably finish the game, or at least the main storyline.

The “point” of overlord is that you’re literally, an evil overlord. You have minions. In the game, you have direct control over the overlord, and partial control over the minions. You point where you want them to go, and they go do what they do. Brown ones are bruisers, green ones are assassins (poison and hiding and backstabbing), red ones throw fire, and blue ones can walk on water and resurrect the others.

I got to a point in Overlord 2 where you’re supposed to “drive” your green minions (on spider mounts) on the wall of a cylindrical room. As they go up and around, they step on pressure points that raise the water level in the room, in order for the platform you are on to float to the top. The problems with this “puzzle”:

1. The puzzle is timed. If you don’t get around fast enough to each trigger, the water stops, and you go back to the last full level.
2. The green minions can die. There was something going on, which wasn’t obvious to me, that was causing the green minions to die from falling or something after the platform went down
3. You have a limited number of minions. Combined with the first two, not only are you time constrained, but resource constrained.
4. Limited/no real camera control. When driving the minions, the camera is always fixed near your original position, and follows where you are “driving” the minions. So you have a very limited range of looking ahead or behind to figure out where to go next. Sometimes you’d get to a point after you dropped back to the bottom that the minions were still on the wall, but now you couldn’t see them to drive them back…There are some points where you’re in direct control of a minion and that was fun, and probably would have made this part much easier.
5. The minions are “walking” on the wall, so the perspective and control is screwy compared to the rest of the time when you’re walking on the ground.
6. horrible control of the minions. You aren’t driving them so much as you’re “suggesting” where they should go. The further up the wall you got the more of a maze it became. As such, most of the time the minions were getting stuck on a barrier or a wall or something and then sticking or stopping there. If you had a group of minions, they also bump into each-other, so that didn’t help either.

I got through the first couple parts of the puzzle pretty quickly, but the third part was insanely frustrating. Sorry CodeMasters, your game shouldn’t devolve into a fight against the controls and the camera. I was to the point i was moving one minion at a time, stopping them (if i could) on top of the switch i needed to trigger, placing a marker there so they’d stay there, then starting with another minion. But even that didn’t work because for some reason they kept falling and dying. After about half an hour of being stuck on this puzzle, i just said “f-this!” (I’d been swearing pretty regularly up to this point, good thing Easton was already sleeping), turned it off, and sent it back to gamefly. There are too many other good games out right now to waste time swearing at a game because the controls suck.

I really liked it! It had a few glitchy things at the beginning, though. You’d think that if you were making a game about ghosts you would maybe maybe write your code in such a way that said ghosts don’t get stuck in the environment. Several times i’d get to a spot in the level where nothing was happening. All of the other ghostbusters are standing around, obviously waiting for something to happen. So i had to run around in the whole level, looking for that one stupid ghost that was stuck somewhere. On one of the first levels, he was stuck between a building and a car. Other times, having the ghosts stuck somewhere turned out to be very convenient, as it meant that there was one less ghost to deal with.

The storyline was pretty good, the flow was pretty good, the acting was “meh”. It has all the original actors in it, but it would appear to me that they recorded all the audio sentence by sentence actor by actor. The conversations between characters didn’t seem like they were all in a room together talking, like it should. One cool thing was how when you got “killed”, the other ghostbusters could come tag you and bring you back, so you only “died” if all of the ghostbusters died. In some of the boss monsters or other places where there were tons of ghosts at once, this meant that you spent most of your time running around reviving the other ghostbusters, and spending what little time you had left actually trying to catch ghosts.

The weapons were mostly cool. I loved the standard proton pack thing, it worked exactly like you’d think it would. The “blue” gun mode thing i hardly used (some kind of freeze ray and a semi-shotgun thing?). The “green” gun was a slime gun, similar to what they used in ghostbusters 2, and towards the end of the game you had to use it far too much. I want to be a ghost buster, wrangling ghosts, not a slime pump! The last gun you unlock, the “yellow” gun was like a ghost-busting machine gun. It was useful in some places, but not many. About the only place i really used it was one of the last bosses.

All in all i thought it was a really good game; it had the feel of the first movie, so it was really entertaining for a movie based video game!

In haiku form:

mirror’s edge, the game
it is a jumping puzzle
and that’s about it.

Well, maybe it had other things, but i never found them. I just couldn’t get into it, because it was just jumping puzzles, so i gave up. I’d just finished Tomb Raider before that, and at least it had puzzle puzzles. And swinging puzzles, and fire puzzles and shooting puzzles, etc. There are just too many other games out to play something that pisses me off.

Fallout 3, by Bethesda Softworks is probably the best game I’ve played so far in 2009. Personally, i think the world felt a lot bigger and a lot more immersive than GTA4.

There was so much to do, and so many places to go, i found myself just wandering unexplored areas of the map to see what i could see. There were some great quest chains, and other not so great, but on a whole it was a great mix of RPG and action. There were some quests that were secondary that could be completed regardless of the main quest, and then there were a fair amount of “mini” quests that don’t show up in the quest list, but showed up as notes instead…which was annoying. Some of the mini-quests were literally seconds long: a dude ran up to me in the middle of the wasteland, and said

Help me! I’m wired with explosives!

And then ran away, and exploded! ooooooops! Sorry dude!

I really enjoyed Oblivion, and this was like a futuristic post-apocolyptic version game using the same engine, minus magic, plus guns. How can you go wrong!?

It started off a little hard, running out of ammo all the time, but towards the middle that ceased to be a problem. Inventory/weight management was probably the most complicated problem in the game . The recent “Broken Steel” DLC was pretty good, raising the level cap and adding some story after the end of the original game, so that was pretty cool too.

One of my favorite parts was how it took place in Washington D.C., and took a fair amount of geography and history into account. There are several chains of quests that have you go through the D.C. area museums/etc to find/recover artifacts that weren’t destroyed in the wars/bombings, like the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Magna Carta. Another set of quests has you finding Abraham Lincoln artifacts (including the head of the statue at the Lincoln Monument!) to help out a group of former slaves (slavery running somewhat rampant in the times that the games take place).

Most of the quests and things in the game let you be good or evil, although none of these games with alignment has really gotten “evil” correct yet. So far, most of the games let you either be a saint, or a dick. There’s no really evil stuff, where you do the good thing only to manipulate people into doing some really evil things. Force Unleashed is probably one of the few games that came close, but you didn’t have a whole lot of choosing there.

The huge amount of voice talent in the game was great too. The people feel a lot more real when the conversation is real speaking, however i always have the subtitles on whenever possible in all games. Its surprising how many games do not have that feature, but to me i like to be able to skip through conversations when i can read them, or have already listened to the speech before too. I only wish some of the background chatter that took place had subtitles as well. There are a lot of places where you can just stand around in the crowd and people are having converations, or the radio is on in the background and ThreeDog is talking about things you’ve actually done in the world. That was a pretty cool touch!

Along with CoD2 and CoD4, this is only the third game i’ve played that i’ve had dreams that take place “in the game world,” so to speak. To me, that’s the definition of immersion. Although with the CoD games, those dreams were more like nightmares of some point in the game getting played over and over and over because i couldn’t get through it. The fallout3 ones were like real life quests in the fallout universe, which was really cool!