Alan Wake was one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long time.  The story was an actual story.  Well, it was really a story about a story, in the form of a game about a story.

A lot of companies have tried to do some kind of “episodic” game, and of any, I think this game could have actually pulled it off if it had been released that way.

The game was set up as several distinct “episodes”, that had a setup of “Previously, on Alan Wake…” and then re-told important parts of the previous chapters.  It was a fantastic way to get you back into the game when you start a new chapter.

As the game went on, the episodes got longer and longer, so it wasn’t as episodic as the first few.  Every time I thought “this is going to be the end of this episode,” it just kept going.  And partway through, I thought I had part of the story figured out based on something a character said, but the story totally went another way.  I really enjoyed finding pages of the manuscript, which explained little things in the story that were happening or were “shadows” (pun intended!) of things to come.

Gameplay wise, it was different than almost anything I’ve ever played.  For most of the game, you have 2 weapons: a flashlight, and a gun of some kind.  And yes, the flashlight is a weapon!  This might also be the first time that a game had a flare gun that was truly truly useful.  It was like the game’s equivalent of a rocket launcher, and it was fun to use!

The story completely set up DLC and a sequel, so this is another sequel I’ll be excited for!

Random Review: Alan Wake was originally posted at John's Random Review.

During the install I’m forced to watch a dude on screen chain smoke the whole time.  Some of the “hints” it gave during this install (emphasis/commentary added):

• konami is not responsible for any damage resulting from misuse (misuse of what?)
• this game is intended for use exclusively with the PLAYSTATION3 system. (no crap, really? is that why its only available on the PS3? where else would I play it?)
• cigarette smoke has detrimental effects to you and those around you, particularly infants and children.
• put litter in its place.  dispose of ashes in ashtrays.
• ensure that you play in a brightly lit room and sit as far away from the screen as possible (except sony makes this impossible, as I need to charge my ps3 controller, and the cord they give you for that is like 3’ long, and apparently the controller only charges if the PS3 is on!)
• avoid playing when you are tired
• be sure to take a 15-minute break every half hour
• if you begin to feel ill, stop playing immediately

THANKS MOM, for the life coaching while waiting for your game to install.

I’m really hoping that smoking is an integral part of the game now.

[72 hours later, waiting for install #2 to complete…so I’ll post more. Yes, this makes 11 minutes of install time now.]

The second install also features the life coaching that the first install did. Nice.

I wouldn’t call smoking an integral part of the game, I’d almost call it a character. Mr. Cigarette appears all over the place, as a usable item, as a major plot point in most cut-scenes. There’s even a cigarette smoking monkey. That’s just awesome.

Another very strange thing is that whenever you start the game, before anything else you get an empty black screen with the standard console “this game uses autosave, so don’t unplug your console while its saving” message.  You have to press X before you even get to  the title screen.  This occurs every time you start the game.  Lame.

The game is also more like a soap opera with an interactive video game between scenes.  Every time you move into a new area, you get a phone call from someone.  A general, your psychologist, your friend’s former fiancé.  There’s a drama about how the colonel is the father of one of the female protagonists, but she grew up thinking he was her uncle, and now he’s married to your shrink, who calls you when you’re stressed out on the battlefield…

[And another hour or so in, I gave up on it.  There are just too many other good games to play, and MGS4:GotP just isn’t my style right now.]

Random Review: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots was originally posted at John's Random Review.

In what has become an annual tradition, we went again this year during spring training. But this year, instead of rifles and revolvers, this year was all about: Shotguns! 

Jim and Art used over/under Browning shotguns, and I used a browning single shot.  We then each shot ~60 birds of trap shooting.  Ben Avery is a huge place, with something like 18 trap fields, so the 3 of us had a trap field to ourselves. This was good since neither Jim or I had shot trap before, and we didn’t want to slow anyone else down.

The range was all automated, with voice activated release.  So there are little speakers on stands in front of you, and when you say “pull” (or whatever you say loud), it flings out your target.  So once you’re up there, there’s no talking, or it will fling out some more targets that nobody will be ready for!  And since the range is all automated, there’s no free targets if you accidentally screw up!

We did all of our shooting from the 16 yard line, which is the closest spot, and for first timers we did really well.  It took Jimbo a little while to get warmed up, and once he was warm he was on fire!  I started off pretty well and stayed pretty consistent.  The only ones I had trouble judging were the ones that fired straight away, with no left or right movement.  I think I shot over the top of those more than anything.  Of around 60 total birds, I think I missed 7, so I was feeling pretty good!  I wanted to try moving back and see if I could still hit anything, but by then, our cards were up!

(If the embedded video is missing, you can see it here)

I think both Jim and I expected a lot more kick from the shotguns, but the trap loads were pretty light, and the shotguns pretty heavy.  I had a tiny little strawberry bruise on my shoulder, but that was probably from one round that I didn’t have the shotgun pulled into my shoulder all the way.  The next day my shoulder was a little more sore, but that could have been from the shooting or from chasing Easy around the pool all afternoon, or most likely both.

The next day, Jimbo was ready to go again, so we know that he enjoyed it.  I had a great time, and can’t wait to see what art has planned for next year!

(If the embedded video is missing, you can see it here)

By some freak coincidence, I think both times I took video, both jim and art missed.  You can’t blame the camera, as in both cases, neither of them noticed .

If we lived closer to Ben Avery, I’d be there all the time; it’s most definitely good for my wallet that we’re a thousand miles away!

Ben Avery Review #2: The Shotgunning Edition was originally posted at John's Random Review.

It wasn’t the best story ever, but I thought the story made more sense than Borderlands!  The side quests were ok, but I think I “broke” some by going through the area and doing something before I got the quest for it.  There were other things where I swear I scoured the whole level, and the thing that was supposed to be there wasn’t there.  And I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking when there was so much other stuff to do.

The controls were pretty good for a PC to Xbox port, although I think some things, like inventory management, could have been simplified.  I accidentally sold or equipped things lots of times because the selection outline and the equipped outline were very similar at first glance.  The text in some areas still seemed to be set up for a PC as well, with a really small font that only used up a small area at the bottom of the screen, with the torchlight logo covering the other 70%. 

But I can easily overlook any of those nitpicks for this one.  About 3/4 of the way through, I felt like I was cheating.  Once I started getting really good equipment and skills, I was just destroying things.  In most games, as you get stronger, so do the bad guys, so even though you’re now doing 10x the damage at level 10, the bad guys are 10x stronger, so there’s not a lot of difference from level 1.  While that was somewhat true in Torchlight, I felt like my character really was a hero.  Hacking and slashing and fireballing zombies and dragons and such was awesome fun.  I didn’t die until the very last boss monster, as health potions were pretty easy to come by.

The verdict on this one is 100% clear.  Spend the points and buy Torchlight.  The only thing that would be better would be co-op multiplayer, so here’s hoping for that in Torchlight 2. And here’s to double hoping the Xbox port comes sooner for the sequel, with how well it has done in sales!

Random Review: Torchlight was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Like the Call of Duty series, I played through MoH on the hardest difficulty (until I saw the “Tier 1 mode” or whatever that I didn’t go back through and play).  But unlike recent CoD games on hard, I didn’t see any real “bugs” with the “good guy” AI.  And the special forces guys in this game could shoot.  While you, as the player, still have to do the majority of the work, the computer controlled players could at least draw fire and provide cover so that you could flank the bad guys.  So for this game, I don’t have to write a version of my “letter to my idiot squadmates” posts.  The effectiveness of my squad did make the game feel a little easier than CoD, but it did make me feel like a good player on a great team, instead of the great player on a crappy team.   However, the game not being as hard didn’t make the game any less enjoyable.

The scenarios and script of the single player campaign seemed very realistic. In fact, some of it seems to be loosely based on the real life situation that was documented by Marcus Lattrell in his fantastic book Lone Survivor. Some other parts of the game were so engrossing that as things started to unfold, I actually was getting worried.  In one section, you’re fighting your way down an Afghan mountain with a small squad of soldiers, vastly outnumbered by the Taliban.  You’re trying to call in close air support, but things just aren’t working out.  You’re hiding in buildings that are slowly getting destroyed by small arms fire and RPGs, and you continue to fall back.  All the while, your squad-mates are counting down ammo.  Soon, they start firing kill shots only.   Then you start hearing “last mag!” and other not good commentary.  When the radio guy tells command to use the air support to help another group because we’re about to be overrun and it would just be a waste of time… At this point, like my squadmates, I’m also getting very low on ammo, and I’m starting to freak out…back in the real world, on my couch, my heart is racing!

There was also a section where you get to be the gunner in an Apache (my favorite helicopter of all time).  Surprisingly, on the hardest difficulty, I got through it pretty quick, and I was only using the main gun.  When playing through again later on easy to pick up some achievements I missed, I realized that the apache also had rockets, and I never used them on hard!  I died a lot more on that section on easy than I did on hard.  But it sure was fun!  Now someone needs to make a game featuring my favorite airplane of all time, the A-10 Thunderbolt II, aka “The Warthog”, but that’s a discussion for another day!

The multi-player was Ok.  I liked some of the progression aspects, but I think the Call of Duty franchise has a better overall system for that.  As a new player unfamiliar with the maps, I was getting sniped far too much for it to be a lot of fun though.  In the Call of Duty games, after you get killed by another player, you see an instant replay from that player’s point of view, so you can at least see where the person is camping as they kill you over and over…

There was a lot of hub-ub when the game was coming out that in multi-player, one side was good guys, and the other side was the Taliban.  There was a huge negative press that you get to be the Taliban.  After EA changed the name to the more generic “OpFor” (opposing force) that is used by militaries around the world in war games (and used in the Call of Duty series of games set in modern day), the rhetoric didn’t seem to calm down much, and Exchanges on military bases still refused to sell the game.  I wonder if they ever sold “Counterstrike”, or the Call of Duty games.  In counterstrike, one side was always the “Terrorists”, and the other was trying to rescue hostages or defuse a bomb planted by the terrorists.  The Call of Duty games always had one set of players being the Axis and the other side the Allies.  Personally, I don’t see the big deal, particularly since the game is rated Mature.

All in all, I thought it was a really good game, and can’t wait for the sequel (bring on lucky number 13 in the franchise!)

Random Review: Medal of Honor was originally posted at John's Random Review.

It had a very interesting psycho-drama going on, with the main character being captured and interrogated by someone, causing flashbacks. The missions occurred in the flashbacks, not entirely in order, and interestingly, sometimes without clear beginning or end. I liked that. Several times you’d be what you’d assume 3/4 of the way through something, and then you’d see something that didn’t make sense, and you’d get shocked back to the interrogation. I thought I had figured out what was going on, but I hadn’t. I like it when a game keeps me guessing.

But, like all of the recent call of duty games, i have to complain about the computer controlled characters. There were many many cases where a bad guy would “rush” wherever the good guys were, and would either kill me, or all the good guys in that vicinity, without the other good guys ever firing a single shot. It was if the good guys never saw the bad guy at all. I always play through the CoD games on the hardest possible difficulty, and maybe that’s what exposes me to the worst flaws. I assume as the difficulty goes up, the good guys in your squad become less effective, requiring you to do more, and makes the bad guys more effective. I get that, that’s fine. But its inexcusable to let a bad guy run across 50 yards of open ground uncontested into the middle of a group of what is supposed to be highly trained special forces soldiers. At least in the previous games, most of the time the offending soldiers were just regular soldiers. In this game, they’re supposed to be operators! The elite! If you’re so elite, do something, other than stand there and die!

Random Review: Call of Duty: Black Ops was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Even so, I can say that I hated herding cattle.  Seriously.  One time is enough to show me the hardships of the old west, but one time is more than enough herding cattle for me . 

The interesting (no spoilers!) thing about the story is that while it might have been a little predictable, I think part of that predictability came from really understanding the main character and his predicament, and the helplessness of the whole situation.  There were certainly things that I personally wouldn’t have done in that situation, but I know that John Marston would have.  I saw most of what I’d call “Act III” coming, and yet when things started unfolding I was not disappointed at all.  It was somehow…fitting.

The dead-eye system worked really well for shooting, especially from the back of a moving horse.  The duel thing was ok, but I didn’t realize until real late in the game that there was a rhythm factor to the shooting that I didn’t notice (or missed in the first tutorial), so a couple of the story related duels I failed and had to do over and over and I never noticed that there was a specific indicator to watch for while aiming.

My only other real complaint (aside from the frigging cattle rustling!) was some of the voice acting.  It seems like a ton of the dialog was just yelling.  Yelling for no reason.  Yes, people are riding horses so you might need to increase the volume of the dialog, but that doesn’t mean the actors should just be yelling all the time.  That just decreases its impact when people really should be yelling.

The hunting/gathering/treasure quests were ok, but what made me stop completely stop dong them was the last gathering one.  Get 15 of x, fine, I’ve been doing that the whole game.  But “get 15 of plant x, and 2 more of every other plant?”  Screw that.  Get your own plants you jerks!

Random Review: Red Dead Redemption was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood just came out, too, so I’ll have to add that to the top of my gamefly list.  I know the new one has some multiplayer, so I’m not sure how much the story continues, as it doesn’t have “3” in its title anywhere…but I’m definitely going to find out!

Random Review: Assassin’s Creed 2 was originally posted at 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?!?

Random Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Ben Avery Shooting Facility was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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.

Random Review : G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Dine Around Seattle was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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.

Random Review: Overlord 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Ghostbusters (the video game) was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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.

Random Review: Mirror’s Edge was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Fallout 3 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Very weird game. It ended in the middle of the story. It took me a while to get a hang of the controls and equipment, and then about the time i was really getting into it, a cutscene ends, and the credits start rolling…

The lack of any kind of in game map was a giant pain, especially in the “cyberspace” thing… which should have had a better name. I mean, to most people that word has a meaning, and that meaning is not “lush green forest”.

The Norse mythology was pretty cool, and the story got pretty interesting. but apparently only interesting enough to set up a sequel? Wierd.

Random Review: Too Human was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Elvis
There are cynics
there are skeptics
There are legions of dispassionate dyspeptics
Who regard this time of year as a maudlin insincere
Cheezy crass commercial travesty of all that we hold dear
Stephen
When they think that
Well, I can hear it
But I pity them their lack of Christmas spirit
For in a world like ours, take it from Stephen
There are much worse things to believe in.

Elvis
A redeemer
and a savior
an obese man giving toys for good behavior
Stephen
The faith in what might be and the hope that we might see
The answer to all sorrow in a box beneath the tree
Find them foolish
Elvis
Sentimental
Stephen
Well you’re clearly none too bright
Both
so we’ll be gentle
Stephen
Don’t even try to start vaguely conceiving
Both
Of all much worse things to believe in

Stephen
Believe in the judgment
believe in Jihad
Believe in a thousand variations on a dark and spiteful god
Elvis
You’ve got your money
you’ve got your power
You’ve got your science, and all the planets going to end within the hour
Stephen
You’ve got your dreams that don’t come true
Elvis
You’ve got the ones that do
Stephen
Then you’ve got your nothing
Both
Some folks believe in nothing
But if you believe in nothing
Then what’s to keep the nothing from coming for you

Stephen
Merry Christmas
Happy New Year
Now if you’ll forgive me there’s a lot to do here
There are stockings still unhung
Colored lights I haven’t strung
Elvis
And a one-man four-part Christmas carol waiting to be sung
Stephen
Call me silly
call me sappy
Call me many things, the first of which is happy
You doubt, but your sad
I don’t, but I’m glad
Both
I guess we’re even
Stephen
At least that’s what I believe in
Both
And there are much worse things

Here’s the video of it from colbertnation:

Hopefully the songs all go up on Amazon or iTunes or something, as i’d download this one for sure to put it on my iphone!

Much Worse Things… was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Sunday night, i awoke in the middle of the night with a splitting headache. Or, toothache, rather. I couldn’t tell which tooth, or even top or bottom, just that the left side of my face hurt. I took some advil, it went away, and I went back to sleep. Monday and Tuesday the toothache kindof came and went but there was no sensitivity to hot or cold or pressure, and i still couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Wednesday was more of the same until dinner time. During dinner, it got to the point that i couldn’t even chew on the left side, but at least i could tell which tooth it was. Wednesday night i barely slept. I probably got about 2 hours of total sleep in 5 minute chunks. Thursday morning i went to the dentist, they took xrays and said that i had an infection in that tooth, and that i’d need a root canal. I was given prescriptions for antibiotics and painkillers and had to come back the next day for the root canal, as they want the antibiotics in your system for at least 24 hours.

I picked up the scrips and started taking them thursday morning. By thursday afternoon, i could tell when the painkillers were wearing off. It was horrible. The painkillers also made me dizzy and sleepy. I ended up napping thursday away, and watching Pee-wee’s Big Adventure over and over on Netflix over Xbox360. Friday i went in for the root canal. The first hour of setup/etc for the root canal was the first time in days that i wasn’t in pain. Nitrous and Novocaine for the win! The root canal itself wasn’t bad at all, aside from the time it took. Start to finish it was around 4 hours. I listened to my iphone and just laid there following directions. The dentist would do stuff, they’d stop and do xrays, repeat. My jaws are a little sore from being pried open for that long, my lips are sore from the dental dam thing rubbing against my face. The day after i feel a little better, but the left side of my face is still sore. I’m going a little longer between painkillers, but that tooth is a little sore from all the work they did on/in it.

I still can’t really do much, as the Vicodin induced dizziness really sucks. It also gives me like a 5 minute attention span. Laura will say something to me, i’ll hear it, but i just don’t comprehend. I’ll ask her to repeat what she said and then i’ll understand. Its annoying to me, i’m sure its annoying to her as well.

I also don’t understand how people get hooked on vicodin. For me it doesn’t make the pain go completely away, it just takes the “edge” off the pain. But I hate being dizzy, but the dizziness is better than the pain. Maybe you have to take like 5 at a time to get high or something? But i’d be afraid it would just make me dizzier and dizzier which would really suck.

Random Review: Root canal was originally posted at John's Random Review.