Hello Danda,

How's life?

Oh, it is a shame how little I have written, but quite frankly, I hardly played any games at all in the past few weeks. I did play some GTA IV again, which managed to frustrate me quite a bit at some mission. Basically, I had to drive all the way across town to follow someone on a motorbike, and of course I fell off the bike at the first unexpected turn. So the guy got away. I restarted the mission, drove all the way across town, fell of the motorbike again, and again the mission was lost. After four or five tries I was so frustrated that I decided to do something else. So I was glad to hear it when a friend of mine told me that for the add-on The Lost and Damned they implemented checkpoints in missions, so you wouldn't have to start all over again. What a great idea!

Apart from that I have only played some DJ Hero on a friend's Xbox 360, and I have to say I found it quite entertaining. I didn't know most of the songs and I'm not a big fan of DJ mashup-music, so I suppose that's why I had more fun playing Guitar Hero with a friend on her Playstation 2 earlier this year. But both games are a lot of fun.

In other news, they released the game Dragon Age: Origins last month that looks really great. You bought it on Steam, right? Did you play it yet? I will definitely have to check that out at some point.

Well, Christmas is approaching and if all goes well, I should be able to do some serious gaming over the holidays/vacation. What's more christmasy than blasting some hellish spawn to pieces? Not much!

Later,
-- Superviv

Dreamkiller cañí

Atchon Burike!

I finished the game in one afternoon. It's a decent Doom-inspired FPS if you'd like to play a budget game from 2004. Yes, I know it came out this year.

Back from the cold (for a day!)

Hi SuperViv!

Here I am, trapped in a remote (and rainy!) part of Spain with no internet connection (I had to do a long walk to find a place to type this) and with no games at all. I had my laptop with me for a few days, but then I sent it away to see if I can get it fixed before I return to Germany on January.

But before I keep going, I'll reply to your posts. I know you are a staunch supporter of the Gothic games. So I bought them (twice, actually: in English and in Spanish), but I still haven't had the time to play them. I got them from one of your fellow German translators at the office, who was nice enough to give me a CD with the latest patch for Gothic 3.

Mass Effect is a great game, but it was tough on my crappy laptop, so I could only play for a few hours. I've seen some Alpha Protocol videos and it looks like they rip off that dialogue style and the action-RPG approach. Now the game has been delayed and I wonder if it was a good idea to pre-purchase it on Steam. But I still trust it to be good. I trust Obsidian, even if they took a lot of heat because their KOTOR II was released unfinished. They have a lot of history, and some really talented people worked on this game. That was a misstep, but their other games are very, very good.

But you know how this goes. You make a bad game, you are in trouble. And in these times, you make a really bad game, you are finished. You release an unplayable game like Lair, and you are whistlying your way to bankruptcy. You ship a really promising but obviously previous-gen game like Haze, you are done (Free Radical was absorbed by Crytek). You ship blander-than-bland dreck like Terminator: Salvation, you go under (that's too bad, because Grin had actually really talented people...). And now we have a new (deserving, I think) victim: Pandemic Studios. The creators of the awfully bland, unplayable (in a Just Cause way) Mercenaries 2 just released their final game, The Saboteur, which predictably is... not very good. At least it looks like it's just a mediocre GTA clone, not a complete mess like their previous game. And I love any game that has some naked chicks just for the sake of it, like The Godfather 2 or Conan, but I will wait until I can get it for 10€ or less.

And this leads to one of my own pet peeves... What's the matter with Rebellion? They keep pumping out very bad games, and they never stop. Yes, they had a hit with the first Aliens vs Predator, but after that, their FPS pedigree is dubious at best. Dredd vs Death was loathsome, and their recent Shellshock 2, which I would like to mention some day in one of my "pest patrol" articles along with other disasters like Damnation and Velvet Assassin, was one of the worst games released last year (only utter crap like LSL Box Office Bust was worse). Their latest "jewel" is Rogue Warrior, a should-be-released-as-budget title which is definitely bad. What is going on here? Why are they still releasing games?

I still can't believe SEGA cancelled the Obsidian-made Aliens RPG at the same time they announced a new, obviously quick'n'cheap Rebellion Aliens vs Predator title. A lot of nostalgic fans are drooling over the low-framerate teasers, but the fact is they look cheap and shoddy. For me, SEGA made the videogame equivalent to Fox shutting down a Ridley Scott or James Cameron Alien movie while greenlighting a new Paul W.S. Anderson AvP sequel.

Oh... I've spent too much time on this, and I couldn't say anything about my "survival gaming" practices. Maybe some other day! (Hopefully...)

See you soon,
- Danda

Gothic 3: Should I buy another RPG I won't get to play?

Hey Danda,

What's up in Spain?

The last week or two have been particularly uneventful in terms of gaming and I think I only played Mass Effect for an hour or two and that was it. I've been busy with some stuff and on some evenings I decided to just watch a movie instead and so I have little to report.

Nevertheless, I read today on www.dvd-spiel-film.de, a cool site that reports on what games and movies come with magazines here in Germany, that the magazine PC Games has Gothic 3 this month, and it's only 5,50 EUR.

I've been a big fan of Gothic 1 & 2 back in the day (when I was in college and had all this spare time on my hands), and I thought those games were awesome, even though I played them in reverse order. Now, Gothic 3 is a different story.

When it first came out I was tempted to buy it as soon as the price dropped a little, but then I read all these reports that the game was no fun because of all the bugs. So I didn't get it and forgot about it. Now my interest was re-awakened by this newest offer, and since I'm not as impulsive of you, I decided to research whether it was worth those 5,50 EUR. I came across a German video on YouTube that demonstrates many severe bugs that make the game sound awful, as did a scathing review by GameSpy.

From what I understand, the game was rushed to be released quickly, which is why there are terrible bugs that range from bushes flying in the air, to NPCs that are incapable of walking over bridges, to your character not appearing after loading a savegame, to quests that can't be completed, to constant system crashes. It's a shame, really.

However, there is supposedly a very good patch out by now, the Community Patch 1.70, which fixes many of the bugs (it's 880 MB in size!) that improves the game greatly and fixes a lot of what was broken. So even though I don't really want to support a developer that would release a faulty product like Gothic 3, I think 5,50 EUR for the game (with the most recent patch already included on the DVD) is too good a bargain to resist, even though I might only get to play the game in 2011.

Over and out,
-- SuperViv

The Pandora Directive and Mass Effect

Hello Danda and JR,

So CCG lasts on my shoulders now? Oh, the pressure!

Well, let me first of all say thanks for the gift certificates for gog.com you gave me. I had never heard of that site before, but it worked very well. I already downloaded The Pandora Directive and I was impressed how well it worked on my super-fast PC, even though it's 13 years old! (I've tried to play old Abandonware before, and sometimes I couldn't even make it work, despite DOSbox). Anyway, I didn't get to install the other game yet, but I will do that soon and report back to you.

So, I played about an hour of The Pandora Directive so far, and of course the visuals are very outdated. Also, the display is rather cluttered (see Mobygames for a screenshot) and I don't think the possibility/necessity to freely move the character around by pressing the spacebar and then moving the mouse makes the game better, even though I'm sure it was impressive back when it was released. However, Tex Murphy is a cool antihero and I find he's likeable enough that I wasn't even bothered by the 10-15 minutes of introduction before the game starts, in which we basically just saw Tex drink and chat. I like that they used real actors for the game (Kevin McCarthy even!), and again I have to wonder why nobody does that anymore, especially considering that it would likely look so much better these days. So the story is interesting and I'm curious to find out what will happen next!

In other news, I got to try out Mass Effect a few days ago and was quite impressed with it - especially with the way they handle dialog in the game.

First of all, the dialog option gives you the basic idea of how you want to react or what you want to say, but when the dialog that is actually spoken, it is very natural. It's well-written dialog, too. Also - and this I find particularly ingenious - you can already choose the next dialog option while the characters are still talking. This way, the dialog flows together more naturally and it makes the game a lot more immersive.

Also in Mass Effect, I like the fact that you can choose to be male or female, which they mostly solved by just giving your character the same last name in both cases, so they can always address him or her as "Shepard". I find that to be a very good solution.

So you see, there are a lot of good games to be played, and sometimes I wish I had the time to be a real core gamer for a while!

Greetings to Spain from rainy Germany,
-- SuperViv

Hey, I must be going!

Hi SuperViv,

In a few hours I'll be taking a plane to Spain for a very long vacation. I must leave this blog in your capable hands alone until 2010, because I won't have a steady internet connection for a couple of months. It's not impossible that I find some internet cafe in the place where I'm going, but who knows!

As a parting gift, JR and I have sent you a gift certificate for two of the best games ever made: The Pandora Directive and Sanitarium. It's been almost ten years since I've played them, but the impression they made was very deep. I hope the 'dated visuals' don't deter you from playing, because the story in those games haven't been equaled. But I'm sure you have a lot of things to do before, like getting stuff sorted out before the long journey you will be making next year. How funny! They say often gamers don't even leave their mom's basement, but we seem to travel a lot. Maybe it's because we are casual core gamers! :D

So long,
- Danda

The Age of RPGing

Hi SuperViv!

Yes, I also played the LSL games before I was mature enough to "understand" them. Anyway, most of the innuendo and double-entendres were butchered in the Spanish translations, so anyway...

Well, I have a huge problem. As you may well know, I'm a modest man living in a modest apartment... of one room. I can't just "send" the kid to sleep, because if he sleeps, I must sleep. Also, my current setup to play console games demands me to darken the room and project a HUGE image in my wall. So if I play, everybody in the room "plays" with me. I can't just turn the screen away so I'm the only one who can see it.

Also, I don't believe that playing action games turns your kids into criminals, but it's also true that it's not a good idea to show God of War and X-Men Origins: Wolverine levels of violence to small children (I'm not linking any videos, so just imagine a bunch of people getting torn apart in many imaginative ways). I was really scared by violence when I was a kid. Now I don't really pay much attention to it, so I can play those games and find it just mildly amusing. "Nice, another decapitation." So OK, I'll let my son play Manhunt when he's 14 years old if he wants to, but not now.

Uwe Boll is a nice guy. And he's made a few decent movies. But in others, he shows no compassion or humanity to his characters. That's probably his main flaw as a filmmaker: he doesn't care about what happens to the characters, so the viewers aren't supposed to care, either, and they lose interest. But some of his movies look great, anyway. Paco Fox is probably right when he says that Boll is much better as a producer than as a director.

I bought the tinbox edition PC version of Far Cry 2 last year, but then I sold it to somebody else when I learned about its f***ed-up DRM ("5 machine activation limit"), and then I bought it again for PS3 with a promotional code to get some extra missions because I really wanted to play it, and then I sold it again when I learned about the glitch that destroyed your save games in a bad moment, and then I bought it a third time when the collector edition got really cheap... The thing is, I'haven't played it yet, but the consensus about this one seems to be that it's really engaging at first, but then you realize how superficial it is. It tries hard to be RPG-ish, but then it's just a regular FPS in disguise.

But now we have lots of true RPGs coming. Dragon Age: Origins has just been released. I was naive enough to buy the "Deluxe Edition" release on Steam, but now I feel really ripped-off, because all those "exclusive pre-order items" that were promised are NOT in the game. I mean, you can't just download them from Steam. I paid $15 extra to have the right to register in EA's site and in Rockstar Social Cl... I mean, Bioware Social Network and redeem my pre-order CD-key there to gain access to those items. Does it sound unnecessarily complicated? It's because that's exactly what it is. I demanded a refund, but of course Steam doesn't issue refunds.

Also, Mass Effect 2 will be released on January. But I'm still not done with the first one! And now that I'm becoming a father, it will be much worse. The RPG genre is the worst enemy of "casualness". I guess very soon I won't even be a casual core gamer. I may become just "casual", and maybe not even much of a gamer. That would be pretty sad. But sometimes you have to choose: your games or your family. I'll try to choose... both. If it's possible.

By the way, I think it's just fair to warn you right now that at any moment after next week I may stop writing on this blog for a few weeks, as I won't have an internet connection when I go to Spain to join my wife. Oh, well. We don't have many readers yet anyway, so it's not really much of a problem.

Have a nice rest of the weekend!
- Danda

Kids, Uwe Boll and the Malaria Medicine

Hey Danda,

No, I wasn't aware that Al Lowe was the guy behind Leisure Suit Larry. I played several of those games before I was old enough to understand them, and in retrospect, I wonder how I managed to solve them way back when, as an innocent prepubescent girl! And I wonder how my English vocabulary sufficed. At any rate, it's good he's okay and that he called the doctor right away. I read that often times, people don't really notice they have a heart attack because sometimes just their arm hurts and they think, whatever it is, it's probably nothing serious.

To jump right to the next topic, I wonder why you wouldn't be able to play violent video games anymore as a father. You sound like one of those crazy German politicians that calls first person shooters "murder simulators" and claims they turn juveniles into maniacs. I guess when your child reaches an age where video games get to be interesting, you just have to make sure that he realizes that reality is different from video games and real violence is not okay. After all, I don't think it's the video games that causes people to go on killing sprees, I think it's their isolation and social problems. Either way, you can always just play any game at all when your kid is sound asleep (think headphones), and I don't see how that would make you a bad father.

Having said that, of course I also think that some movies and possibly games aren't appropriate for young kids, and I recall an episode of This American Life where someone talked about watching The Shining when he was six years old, and how that basically kept him from sleeping for two years. But yeah, send your kid to bed early, and the rest of the night is all yours. ;)

And speaking about movies, I really like Uwe Boll since we went to meet him, he was so nice and pleasant, and I don't think Bloodrayne is as bad as it's made out to be - it can't be, because it seems I must've lent my Bloodrayne DVD to someone and whoever has it never gave it back. Dungeon Siege also wasn't bad. But I admit, BloodRayne II was a complete piece of garbage, and even I can't find it in me to defend it, hehe.

I myself haven't gotten around to playing much lately, so I'm still stuck in GTA IV somewhere. My brother finished Far Cry 2 not too long ago, even though he thought it was frustrating that you always had to go back and forth between locations and enemies came back to places where you killed everyone earlier. A friend of mine said he stopped playing it when he couldn't find malaria medicine anymore. So I guess that game is not high on my list of games I want to play.

Well, keep playing while you still can, and if you ever feel being a father is so stressful that you can't find time for your Playstation 3 anymore, I'd be kind enough to take it and take care of it for you. ;)

Regards,
-- SuperViv

What?! Al Lowe's had a heart attack

Hi SuperViv,

A couple of months ago, I joined Al Lowe's mailing list. Have you ever heard of him? He was the guy who created those old Leisure Suit Larry games. Now he's kind of retired, so he just sends a couple of free jokes to people everyday. But today I got this mail, and it was no joke:

I apologize for today's jokes being so late, but I have a good excuse: Tuesday afternoon I had a heart attack--but now, 24 hours later, I'm doing fine. Fortunately, I called 911 immediately, the paramedics got to my house within 5 minutes, got me to the hospital quickly, and within an hour, I was in the operating room having a stent installed. As soon as it was in, I felt better. By last night I felt pretty good, all things considered. I expect to go home tomorrow. My doctor says it's because I didn't wait to get help. So, take some friendly advice: if something "feels wrong," don't hesitate. Call for help!

I'm relieved that he's fine. You know, he is a really influential figure in videogames, even if he doesn't make them anymore (partly because the dumb suits holding the rights for the Larry series don't want to hire him), and it would be sad to see him go. Also, my father died after a heart attack, and I'm getting fatter everyday, so I guess I'll have my own heart attack in ten or fifteen years. So never forget this: try to stay healty, and know your emergency numbers just in case!

Later,

- Danda

I couldn't post this earlier because I just can't stop playing Uncharted 2!

Hi SuperViv,

Yes! Now that I'm going to be alone for a whole month, this is my last chance to play games in a hardcore way. The problem with being a father is that you can't play ultraviolent stuff anymore. That would include 80% of my favourite games! :(

Nice Minesweeper trailer. Is the movie going to be directed by Uwe Boll or what? That would be funny. Remember when we went to his house [Hey, readers! Did you know he lives just half an hour away from the office where SuperViv and I work?]) and interviewed him? I really got the impression that Minesweeper was probably the only game he's ever played. Oh, and his own game.

Still, I think Picross really makes a difference with those little animations you get. Some of them are really funny, so completing a puzzle is very rewarding for me. The only problem is that Picross has an eventual end, when you run out of puzzles. Minesweeper is potentially endless, if you never run out of patience...

Yes, I got Uncharted 2. And my short review is this: Uncharted 2 is the best console game I've ever played.

Of course there's a train sequence! And you know, I personally believe a game is made x2 times more awesome if it has a sequence in a speeding train. The original Soldier of Fortune, Shadows of the Empire...

I'll tell you more about it soon. Now, I'm trying to complete my third playthrough!

Later,

- Danda

More Sims, Minesweeper: The Movie, and Uncharted 2

Hi Danda,

So, now that your wife is in Spain, I imagine you will be playing more video games again! :)

I haven't played a lot lately, but I'm still itching to complete GTA IV. It's taking me forever.

I do like games like The Sims or The Movies and such, although I find it's easy to get tired of them if you don't really have a defined objective. In The Sims, your objective of course was to improve in your job (or at least I think it was), and that was fun until you had to have a certain number of friends in order to progress in your job, which meant you had to have people over and then talk to them again and again till your sim basically collapsed due to exhaustion. It just got tiring after a while. Years ago when I was playing it and got bored with it, I decided to just create a commune of 10 people in it to make it more exciting, but I didn't have enough bathrooms and they kept peeing on the floor and threw their trash everywhere. Shocking.

Picross is fun, as is Minesweeper. I don't think the payoff in Picross of seeing a new image or animation is really more exciting than simply winning in Minesweeper, though. Also, have you seen the trailer to the Minesweeper movie? Hehe.

By the way, you wrote JR that you're going to get Uncharted 2? I saw a review of Uncharted 2 a while ago and it looks awesome. It's too bad they're not making this into a PC game. Sad also that it's not even out for the Xbox 360, even though that's the console I think I'd be getting if I were to get a console. Oh well.

Also, there seems to be a scene in the game where you have to fight your way along a moving train, and it reminds me very much of a really old game where you also had to do that, but for the life of me, I can't remember what that game was.... Any ideas?

Anyway, have a good day!

Game on,
-- SuperViv

Never buy a piece of crap!

Hi SuperViv!

I'm sorry that I took so long to answer. My wife was about to leave to Spain and I wanted to spend all the time I could with her. I didn't even touch any videogame these days. But I intend to catch up now!

So we all agree. Never buy an Acer laptop! You can quote me if you want! :D Next time I'll probably buy a Toshiba.

I can't play games like The Sims, I just can't. I don't like those games where you don't have a clear goal, and you just do it to improve your character, or the way you play. That's why I can't stand those fighting games in a fixed setting. You play, you get better at playing, then you play again, you get even better... And there's no end. I prefer if they say, "this is point A, get to point B", not going in circles while "having fun". For me, that's the same as sitting in a rocking chair. I need a story in my game, or at least a progression.

I also get bored with the Minesweeper. It's fun, but just for ten minutes. But I love Picross, which is basically the same thing but with a point, because after every puzzle you get an image with a funny animation. It's my favourite DS game so far. Well, or it was until I knew Rhythm Paradise! (wink, wink!)

I know some people disagree, but Ghostbusters is not a very good game. The design choices in some cases are dead wrong. I was stuck for two weeks in a boss fight because its attack patterns made it unwinnable if you were hit only once when your AI partners were down. That's bad design!

But if you tried the Wii version... Well, it follows the same template as the other versions, but in fact it's a different game. It reminds me of what Ubisoft did with Splinter Cell: Double Agent. With almost the same script and dialogues, they created two different games. I played the Wii version of SCDA and I really enjoyed it, and I was surprised to read reviews saying that "the changes to the Splinter Cell formula were disappointing". They were referring to the "bigger" versions, because the Wii game looks and feels exactly like the previous titles, so I bought the PS3 version to check what they complained about. I still haven't tried it, though.

Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to send an email to JR. He never replies because he's too busy (he just moved to a new place, and you now how exhausting that is), but I like writing letters to him anyway.

See you soon!

- Danda

****************

Hi JR!

So you decided to buy the new Painkiller compilation on Steam! I already own the GOG.com version, and everybody says that the sequel is not as good as the original. Often, when the original developers move on, the sequels just stop being any good. But you know, I'm such a completist that I'll have to buy it too :D

There's also a new Painkiller-like game in town: Dreamkiller. It's intended as a "spiritual successor" (the title makes it very obvious), but there's a catch: it was developed by the same people who... developed the sequel that nobody liked. Bummer! Of course, the reviews are not very favorable. Well, I wasn't going to buy it anyway...

What I'm definitely going to buy is this week's big new release, Uncharted 2. I really love the first title, quite possibly the finest PS3 release so far. The gameplay was great (some Prince of Persia/Tomb Raider platforming, a lot of shooting from cover), the acting was very good (note: I played with Spanish audio), and the music was amazing! It even has a title track that would be great in a movie. I don't usually buy full-prize, new releases, but this one definitely deserves it.

There are other new releases this week. We have Brütal Legend, which looks promising, but we'll see. Oh, and next week we have Borderlands. This doesn't look as good. I don't mean its look, because I like cell shading (I was one of the only ten people who liked Ubisoft's shooter XIII). No, I'm more worried about it's mechanichs. If I'm playing any FPS, I like being able to kill someone with a single headshot. Here, everybody has "health bars" floating above their heads, and I've seen some videos where you laboriously chip away the enemies' health emptying magazine after magazine on them. How stupid! But I'm being unfair, because I'm judging it as an FPS, when it's actually a "dungeon crawler" RPG in disguise. When you kill enemies, they will drop weapons with random statistics. That's something I don't like in Guild Wars and similar games: you have to check all the weapons left after you kill someone to see if it's slightly better than yours. After a while playing GW, I stopped checking or caring.

I don't know... I've never loved any game made by Gearbox Software. Half Life: Opposing Force was really disappointing, Brothers in Arms is an acquired taste, and in some ways it really annoyed me... But maybe Aliens: Colonial Marines will change everything. I certainly don't expect Borderlands to do that. Will I be wrong?

Now I'm looking forward to playing Uncharted 2. The buzz is really good about this one!

The Sim that cooked itself and the ubiquitous GTA IV

Hi Danda!

Oh yeah, I've heard a lot of bad things about Acer. This girl I knew had a laptop by them, too, and after a while it kept switching off randomly. I suppose it also was related to an overheating graphics card, even though she probably didn't have the best of the best, since the only games she was ever interested in playing were Minesweeper and The Sims. (I think she got annoyed with The Sims and stopped playing when she finally found her Sim a husband, who then promptly set himself on fire and burned to death when he tried to cook a meal.)

I have a Dell Inspiron 8200 and I've had it since 2003 or 2004, I believe. A few months ago it broke, showing graphic errors and not loading correctly. Customer service told me it was most likely the graphics card (duh) but that they didn't have parts for such an old machine anymore, so they couldn't fix it. Then, a few weeks ago, my brother took it apart, cleaned everything out with a brush and put it back together, and miraculously, it worked again for a few days before it once more refused to start up. At any rate, it was a good laptop and I was happy with it for a long time. Maybe I'll find a used graphics card for it on eBay.

As for Beyond Good & Evil, I actually played it for a while before I had to reinstall Windows. However, I didn't find it particularly gripping, or at least the first hour wasn't. But I suppose I should give it another shot, since you seem to like it so much!

I think the city and the cars in GTA IV do look really nice, and it's fun to see the effects on your car that come from crashing into stuff. The other day I crashed into a concrete block on the road and the car headlight broke and the concrete block got cracks. As for the characters, I suppose some look better than others but I find they're generally nicely animated. Maybe the style isn't entirely aesthetically pleasing for everyone. Maybe it's your projector's fault! (Kidding.)

As for some of the negative things about GTA IV, my brother pointed out recently that sometimes there is a lot going on at the same time (someone talking, you have to watch the map, instructions show up on the screen that you have to read), and he found that rather annoying about the game. However, I for one will keep playing!

You're the second person to tell me that Ghostbusters is awkward. Someone told me it doesn't look nice and most of the time you have to use some device that slows you down, which he finds annoying. I've watched the movies way back when, but from the two minutes of the game I played in a game store once, it didn't seem like something I'd want to get. Then again, it was the Wii version I tried, and I suppose you shouldn't judge a game by its Wii version.

Well, let me know what you think of Jade Empire. I haven't played it, but it looks promising on Gametrailers.com.

So long!
-- SuperViv

Am I a graphic whore? Yes I am.

Hi SuperViv!

Ah, the old "buy a new graphics card or not" dilemma all PC gamers have at some point... Yes, I was tired of struggling with the newest games, so when I had to buy a new laptop, my brother convinced me to buy a model that had a really powerful nVidia card. So now I can play almost every PC game released now...

...but only for five or ten minutes. Then, the graphics card overheats, and the screen goes black. No!!! So that's why you don't play games on a laptop. I'm so annoyed. Hey, listen to my advice: never buy an Acer laptop. They really suck. My last Acer laptop just died just as the guarantee expired. And then I bought this high-end Packard Bell. And then JR let me know that Packard Bell belongs to Acer since 2008. So no wonder I'm now screwed again.

Oh, I nearly forgot! I don't want to embarrass you in public, but you should definitely play that Beyond Good & Evil game that you got from me. And you shouldn't play Raven Squad. According to Metacritic, it's a dud (with an average of only 38%!).

I know some day I will play GTA IV again, but it's so ugly! For me it's not one of those games that look awesome, and then one day you realize that the graphics are really blocky and simple. I think it's probably one of the worst-looking games I've played using my projector. Everything is so dark and dirty! A good reason to keep playing would be the new downloadable content, but it's just an Xbox 360 exclusive, so I'm screwed.

I played the first level of Dead Space, and it looks really promising, but I didn't want to scare my wife (I had to put down Condemned 2 for the same reason). She's going to Spain next week, so I guess I may keep playing now. But I'm already busy with other games! I'm trying to finish Ghostbusters, which is an awkward game. A lot of people say "hey, this is great", but no, it isn't. In some aspects it's really a poor game, but the love for the original movies shows, and it's enjoyable on that level.

I would like to see a game where moral decisions mean something. For that reason, I've bought a bunch of Bioware RPGs to see how they deal with that. Knights of the Old Republic, Jade Empire... Oh, and I have to keep playing Mass Effect soon. If only my graphics card didn't play tricks on me!

Later
- Danda

Graphics, Dead Space and some more GTA IV

Hi Danda!

Ah yes, I still have your Tex Murphy: Overseer DVD. I have to make a list with what games to play in the near future. I think I still have a whole game box from you!

Last weekend, I played some GTA IV on my sister's PC, and while my graphics card is an ATI Radeon HD 3600 with - I believe - 256 MBs of RAM, my sister has twice that and so on her system, GTA IV looks a LOT better. My PC is only one year old, so I'm a little bummed out, and I'm wondering if I should buy a new graphics card for it. Then of course the question would be which one and who knows what problems a new graphics card would bring. But since I have a super-fast CPU, it just seems a waste to only have a slow graphics card.

At any rate, I've never heard of Raven Squad before, but the screenshots on Gamespot look interesting. You don't seem impressed by it, though.

Another game I recently read about and watched a review to is Dead Space, which is supposed to be really good, very immersive, and extremely creepy. Have you ever played it? I'm very tempted to get it, if only because they say it's great how the HUD is integrated into the game and doesn't distract. However, I get scared very easily and this doesn't sound like a game I would want to play in a dark, empty apartment. (That's also why I only read House Of Leaves in daylight.)

As for GTA IV - remember how I told you that I wasn't impressed with their "moral decisions" that much? Well, saving that one guy at the beginning now gave me lots of missions with him, so that's nice. But now I'm in a much bigger pickle, as I have two friends who want to kill each other, or rather, they want me to kill the other one for them. That's an interesting development, and I haven't decided yet what to do about it.

I believe a good way of introducing morals into a game would be to actually have to decide between doing the "good" thing and having big disadvantages because of it, or doing the "bad" thing and being rewarded for it. That would be much better than making the "right" decision and being rewarded for that, because as they said in one of my favorite films, The Contender, "Principles only mean something when you stick to them when its inconvenient."

On that note, have a good day!

Later,
-- SuperViv

Tex Murphy weekend!

Hi SuperViv,

Remember when I gave you that "Tex Murphy: Overseer" DVD game, hoping that you would play it some day? Well, I firmly believed that the Tex Murphy games are awesome (I still do) and I wanted to "spread the word". Well, now all those games are officially available again, sold online in XP/Vista-compatible releases, on the great site www.gog.com. And this weekend only, they offer a 30% sale!

http://www.gog.com/en/page/tex_promo/

There's one irony about this, though. The DVD version is so problematic that they are offering only the (slightly inferior) CD version. So you can still keep the disc that I gave you!

Later
- Danda

No choices! & Sony leaks (part XXVII)

Letter 1:



Hi SuperViv!


One of this days somebody will create the definitive action-strategy hybrid (which is not Raven Squad). But even then, I can't guarantee that I'll play it! :D


I admire the Command & Conquer series because they kept having FMV sequences even after they were officially declared to be uncool. And with great actors! If your game has Michael Ironside or Tim Curry, for me it's automatically promoted to "worth playing", even if it only had a loading screen. Maybe someday I will play them all, if we get another "definitive" compilation, or when a less lazy reissue of C&C: The First Decade includes a more user-friendly instalation process (when you install it you have to enter seven CD keys!)

My brother is a die-hard strategy gamer (he loves the Civilization and Alpha Centauri games, and is now playing the heck out of Hearts of Iron III), but he usually skips RTS games altogether, unless they are in space! I guess he just wants to have (virtual) power in his hands, but he doesn't care much about explosions and stuff. Though it's always interesting to have nukes in a game, and he says the nuclear bombs from Rise of Nations are very cool.

Now here's a GTA IV tip for you: If you want to date that lawchick, just keep looking for dates on the internet after the game requests you to date some dude for a mission.

I think the good/evil "decisions" in GTA IV are a joke. You are forced to act evil all the time! There was one mission in which I didn't want to shoot some unarmed guy on behalf of a paranoid scumbag I didn't even like, and the game didn't acknowledge my attempt to walk away from the murder. Some other times, I was given the chance to spare one guy or the other. But I wanted to kill both!

That's an interesting link! The matter of "moral choices" is a hot topic right now, but it's not very well done in games. It hasn't moved forward since Jedi Knight: you got "dark" powers and a bad ending. And that's it. Not really challenging, is it? So we are now offered lots of meaningless choices (if any) which don't change anything other than adding a +1 to the evil counter. You become too evil and a bad ending is silently triggered. Morality in games hasn't gone very far, don't you think?

Later,

- Danda

Letter 2: (replying to my buddy JR, who just sent me this)



Hi JR!


The house that Sony built is certainly leaky! So now everybody knows that they do have the technology to emulate the PS2 on the PS3 (of course they do! They had it two years ago after all). To tell you the truth, I think it's great that they start selling PS2 games on the PSN store, because I don't own one single PS2 game. You know, I almost bought a re-issue of ICO in Dublin in 2005, but it was too expensive!


Of course, if they can do that, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't play the game if you already own it. You know, like with Xbox games. If you have, say, Conker: Live & Reloaded, you can play it on your Xbox 360 because it's on their retrocompatibility list. I completely assume Sony will do the same, right? I hope their customers won't accept less than that.


Oh, but there's actually more interesting information in that document, even if it's not highlighted as "the more interesting bits":



Alpha Protocol:

You know, I already preordered this for PC on Steam... but at some point I considered playing it on PS3. It's being developed by Obsidian, the company founded by members of the original Fallout game. According to Sony, it feels "barely RPG", and it's too challenging at first (it reminds me of how I got owned time after time by the rats on the first Fallout screen! You don't want to know how I fared against the radscorpions that attacked the first town...). Sony's product evaluator produced a great quote: "Mass Effect felt more RPG". Of course, many people feel Mass Effect can't be considered an RPG at all.

Planet 51:

For me this is specially interesting. Pyro Studios, from the Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines series, is behind this. Sony is worried because movie tie-ins traditionally underperform. Well, they underperform because they are crap. But I think this case is different: Pyro Studios hasn't been hired to create "the game from the movie". Actually, the game developers from Pyro Studios are directing the movie. Yeah, you read that right.

Yakuza:

Japanese imports? Yes! (And I don't even understand Japanese!)

Game + movie bundles:

Of course! Why didn't they even thought of it before? I even bought the Collector's Edition of Stranglehold just to get Hard Boiled in HD. And in Germany, you can buy Ghostbusters with the movie.

Of course, "the movie" means "the movie in HD". Some UK stores offered Wanted: The Videogame for the PS3... with the DVD! Why?! I already have a PS3 and I want the Blu-ray!

It's funny how the big secret from the document (the potential PS3 price cut) was already leaked weeks ago!

I know you're very busy, but I hope you have time to reply!

Hope to hear from you soon!

- Danda

Real-time strategy vs. turn-based strategy

Hey Danda!

I'm not entirely surprised that you don't like strategy games if your only real contact with them was Stalin vs Martians! Although that viral campaign looks like fun... A dancing Stalin? Why not!

Seriously, though, I realize that strategy games aren't for everybody. I played Command & Conquer mostly for the video sequences when it came out in the mid-90s. (A lot is possible with animated cut-scenes these days, of course, but videos of real people do have their own appeal.) I also vividly remember playing Command & Conquer against my brother via null modem (who does that anymore?) and also losing constantly. But I still liked the game.

Meanwhile (with age?) I prefer turn-based strategy games over real-time strategy games, though, as they're generally a lot less hectic. Games like Civilization III and, before that, Colonization, or even X-Com: UFO Defense and SimCity have captured my attention for many more hours than real-time strategy games have. Of course, it might also be that it's because Civilization, Colonization and SimCity were less about war and more about nation-building.

At any rate, as you know, I'm now quite taken with GTA IV now, even though I didn't yet get to the part where it's possible to date that "lawchick". There's still a lot to explore in the game, and the in-game Internet is one of those things. By the way, it's a shame you can't choose to play the game as a woman, although I do admit that in this particular game, the story so far wouldn't really work if you could. (I recently read an interesting article about the "issue" of having to play male characters as a female gamer: Writer Ann Aguirre talks games | GameCritics.com.)

I was surprised to find out yesterday that I could make a "good" or an "evil" decision in GTA IV, and I wonder what the effect on the story will be in the future. However, shortly after that morally sound decision I made, I had to execute someone, and I don't think there was away around it, which makes the importance of the earlier decision doubtful.

Anyway, I'm curious to see what happens next, and I'm just glad that the people I accidentally hit with my car in wild chases through Liberty City don't weigh negatively on my karma!

Speaking of moral decisions in video games, there's another interesting article (Decisions, Decisions | GameCritics.com) about that on the same site as the other article, which agrees with you in the assessment that the moral choice system in BioShock was lame. (That's what you think, too, isn't it?) In retrospect, I have to admit that I was never tempted to replay BioShock as "evil", harvesting all the Little Sisters. From what I understand, the only difference would be that I'd get to see a different ending. That's not enough payoff for a casual core gamer!

Game on,
- Viv

I don't want to join that club

Hi SuperViv,

I'm really sorry that I can't say anything about Rise of Nations. I never play any strategy games whatsoever. They are just not made with me. Maybe it has to do with the fact that my brother is the king of strategy games at home, and I just don't want to compete with him.

And I guess I'm really unlucky, because the last "strategy" game that I tried to play was the abysmal Stalin vs Martians, easily one of the worst games ever made. I think they were going for the high camp seen in some of the Command & Conquer games, but obviously they didn't even try. The final result is something like a fan-created, horrible Cannon Fodder-like arcade game. You just move your units around, trying to shoot martians with a non-existing interface (just point and click, no statistics whatsoever) and dying arbitrarily. Oh, and you are forced to listen to god-awful techno tunes.

I bought this game because the viral campaign for it was so insane I thought maybe it would be fun. But it wasn't. This game was so bad that it was pulled from Steam after a few months. Or maybe it was because some of the martians in the game were ripped off straight from Toy Story, Pikmin and Doom. Look it up, it's true! Sadly, this is not a case of "it's so bad, it's awesome". This is just soul-crushingly bad.

Now, to GTA IV... Well, I played that game on my PS3, and of course taking your friends out is a chore, but... you know, the game doesn't exactly force you to do it. You know, it's a bit like real life: you neglect your friends, you lose them, and that's it (hey, that's what I usually do in real life!). Just consider this option an "extra" advantage, in a purely pragmatic way. You know, the conversations and stuff get old quickly, but it's still good to date that "Lawchick" you meet on the internet ocasionally to get your "Lose police heat" free card.

I also have the PC version. I bought it on Steam as it was part of a "all GTA" package, but I never even installed it. The Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live membership requirement is one of the most stupid ideas ever. I've been a PC gamer all my life, but I've jumped ship and become a console gamer because I just hate those intrusive "activate the game on the internet" schemes. They are really stupid, and only punish those who buy the game (you won't find any of this crap in the pirated versions!). The same happened to me when I bought the House M.D. DVDs and I had to suffer through that annoying (and unskippable) "Piracy is a crime" video in every single disc. But I already bought the DVDs and I'm not a criminal! Hello?

I have many of the Unreal Tournament games. I even played intensively the first one (offline!), but a couple of weeks ago I tried playingg UT 2004. It didn't help that I never played when it was first released, so I lasted ten minutes before I uninstalled it. I have UT III, so what's the point?

Speaking of the Unreal engine, I'm currently playing Batman: Arkham Asylum, and in my opinion it is very good, but not amazing. And it's ugly as sin. It's really sad that this game is regarded as A+ material; it indicates that video game design has been slowly declining into mediocrity. For me, this game can be accurately described as Metal Gear Solid with Batman.

Hear from you later!

- Danda

Being a bad conqueror and an illegal immigrant (Rise of Nations & GTA IV)

Hi Danda!

Sorry for the radio silence. Another week and weekend has gone by. I recently bought Rise of Nations that they gave away for 4,99 EUR or so in a German gaming magazine, and I have been playing that vigorously for a few days. It's ideal for casual core gamers! You can start a mission, and those that I have played mostly require you to win against your enemy in 90 minutes. So after 90 minutes, you either won or you lost, but the mission ends and you can decide that you've played enough and go do something more productive. Like the dishes.

Of course, the bad thing about the game is that it is somewhat difficult and so I kept losing after a while and then decided it wasn't fun anymore. It doesn't help that they hide some options as advanced options that are really important for the game, like the option to make your soldiers protect your catapults. Catapults can be destroyed very easily by an enemy, so imagine how happy I was when I found the hidden option to use all my military to protect them! That certainly rid the enemy of some of his buildings quickly.
However, I kept building a huge military and attacking my enemy's cities and still ended up with nothing but dead soldiers. I might not be using the right strategy.

At any rate, I have now switched to GTA IV. If you look at amazon.co.uk (where they are selling the game for 14.99 GBP, which currently is only around 17 EUR), you will see a lot of negative comments. In fact, as I'm writing this, the game has 5-star reviews 48 times, and 1-star reviews 120 times. Most people are complaining about the Rockstar Social Club and Windows Live, which I completely agree should be an option and not a requirement. I don't want to play online, so I wish they'd just leave me alone. Also, I have a fairly decent system and can't even play the game on highest details, let alone my screen's full resolution, 1680 x 1050.

The story so far is interesting, though, and I'm sure it will be nice to turn my fresh-off-the-boat Eastern European immigrant character into a notorious ruler of the underworld, or whatever the goal will be. I'm skeptical, though, about having to take your friends in the game out for a night on the town in order to stay friends with them. That seems like incorporating a bit of The Sims into GTA. Who wants that? But I will report back to you when I played it for a while longer.

In other news, my brother managed to fix my laptop this weekend (a Dell Inspiron 8200 with graphics troubles) by taking it apart and cleaning each part with a brush. Now, strangely enough, it works again (it was probably a loose contact) and so I spent some of my Sunday playing Unreal Tournament against him. It's also amazing to see how many people still play the game online, considering that it's been released quite a few years ago.

Game on,
- SuperViv

RPGs are too addictive! Also, DNF is the most appropriate title ever.

Hi SuperViv!

OK, I'll probably follow your advice. No Oblivion! I definitely want to play Fallout 1, but I need to be on the right mindset. I can't just drop into the game, because I'm easily turned off by the gaming conventions and design contraints old games have. We've come a long way and now games are so user-friendly that it's hard to go back to the basics. I've read that Fallout 2 was broken because it was rushed out (always a bad sign for a game), though a fan-created patch fixes that. Then, there's a third game for PC, "Tactics", and one for consoles, "Brotherhood of Stell", but they are not RPGs anymore.

Of course I know Guild Wars! Actually, my first professional translation was an expansion for this game, Guild Wars: Nightfall. The text was so interesting that I bought two copies of the game afterwards, and I started to play it with my brother. That's the best way to enjoy it! I also bought the other games and played through most of the Prophecies campaing.

The thing with GW is that it's actually a MMORPG simulacrum, and it can be described as a regular RPG designed to be played with up to three other players in coop mode or solo. Great you can play solo! Though an early gate in "Prophecies" can only be opened with the help or another player. I don't know if they have changed that now that some servers (the Spanish one, at least) are completely deserted with no other humans in sight (and I did notice that the difficulty of some enemy encounters have been drastically toned down). It's a shame, because it's just a great game.

I think the best thing about Guild Wars is that it's so casual-friendly. You can play a bit, do a few missions, and then pick it up several months later. So I've been playing it for almost three years now. That's the only way for me; I don't like the WoW mechanism of buying your way into the game: once you start paying the monthly fee, then you just have to play. This creates a pressure on the player, a pressure I don't want or need. I don't want to give up my life for a f***ing game.

I'm still waiting for Did Not Finish... I mean, Duke Nukem: Forever. They should just release what they have as a shareware product (back to the good old times!), and call it DNF: The Lost Levels.

I've been playing Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazzard lately, and there's a jab at Duke Nukem ("Nuke Winter: Coming Soonish!) during the last level. Which is stupid, because Matt Hazzard is supposed to be Duke Nukem, and because DNF is probably better in its unreleased form that this boring mess of a game. Maybe one day I'll tell you what's wrong with it. Too bad, because it definitely had potential for greatness!

See you tomorrow!
Danda

The Fallouts and Guild Wars (or: The beginning of an addiction?)

Hi Danda,

Wow, if you really want to play all the previous games to any new series you start, you'll have your hands full, I tell you. I played Fallout 1, it was fun, and then I tried Fallout 2, but it was way too difficult. For me, anyway. And the first Fallout 3, I thought that wasn't even released? As for playing Oblivion first... well, that's a little far-fetched, I'd say. But it's not like I'd want to discourage you from it. It's a fun game, although so far not as gripping as Morrowind. It's easier to get into it, though, because it begins with a clever tutorial in a prison dungeon at the beginning of the game. Just like Fallout 3 had a nice beginning, where the tutorial was cleverly built into the telling of the background story. Bethesda does that well. However, as you pointed out, it's also a time consuming game, and when you're not completely taken by the story or you get side-tracked and do something else, you forget what you did before and then you'd almost have to start again to enjoy it. And then you'd have to go through the tutorial again. And it won't be as much fun the second time around.

At any rate, I did go out yesterday and bought Guild Wars - the first chapter, entitled Prophecies. A friend of mine talked me into it, since he is playing it all the time, and so I bought it knowing that he'd be joining up with me and explaining the basics. I can see how such games make people addicted to them, especially when there is someone else who has an interest in you playing. The graphics are pretty good, considering the game was released in 2005. But it's still being played four years later, and the good thing about this MMORPG is that you don't have to pay for anything else but the game itself. No subscription fees. That is certainly a good selling point.

The game has a story, of course, but you can also just go out and do quests for a long time, just building your character, learning the basics, looking around. The fighting is still a bit confusing to me. You basically just click on the enemy and your character starts beating on it, and then there are special skills you can use, some of which become available when you get adrenaline from fighting. So basically I just clicked on the enemy and then was frantically clicking on my skills, and many times I ended up winning. There's still a lot I have to learn. But it will be nice to have my friend teach me.


Anyway, I imagine if "normal" games are too time-consuming for you with their 100 hours (which I entirely understand, after all you're a casual core gamer!), you're likely to stay away from MMORPGs until you retire. But if you don't, get Guild Wars and we can kill monsters together!

And last but not least, let me tell you that that Bionic dude looks a lot like Duke Nukem (see image). Which reminds me, I think Duke Nukem Forever is coming out this year. Heh.

Talk to you later!
- SuperViv

Swinging around Casual Core Land, or My day with Bionic Commando Rearmed

Hi SuperViv!

Well, you know my BASIC routine for a great game would be a lot shorter.

10 make teh best game ever!
20 the world explodes
30 goto 10


No, don't tell me after 20 there would be no 10 to come back to. I already know, but I don't care!
Oh, Fallout 3... I bought it last year, but I still haven't being able to even unwrap the game. My problem with a game like this is that it demands a lot of time, but not only because of the game itself (with all those DLC releases I'm sure I would end up playing for 100 hours). My problem with games like this is that I feel "morally compelled" to play its ancestors before I start with it. And this game comes from a big family. I won't count Wasteland (thank god!), but you still have Fallout, Fallout 2, "the third Fallout game nobody quite loves", and... Oblivion. Yes, Fallout 3 owes a huge lot to Oblivion, but if I jump onto that branch of the family... Well, I have Morrowind as an ancestor (I won't look earlier than that), and then you have all those expansions (the Shivering Islands, etc)... So because of my obsession with playing "all the games", I have locked myself out of Fallout 3!

My love-hate relationship with RPGs is getting worse. Yesterday, Bioware's Knights of the Old Republic was finally released on Steam. I'm trying to play Bioware's Mass Effect (and enjoying it), so I don't know if it will be jarring for me to jump into the "previous generation" later. But I definitely want to play KOTOR, and even the ill-fated KOTOR II, developed by the creators of the original Fallout, but released before the final stretch of the game was properly finished.


But I almost forgot... Yesterday I decided to play Bionic Commando Rearmed, at last. This was one of the first games I tried when I bought my PS3 last year and started trying all the demos available, and IMO it still is the best thing on the PlayStation Store. The game has been patched recently to include trophy support, and a more casual difficulty level (infinite lives!). That was just what I was waiting for!

It's true that I finished the game in just one day. Well, it doesn't matter, because I really enjoyed almost every minute of it. And I say almost, because this game is very forgiving for casual players if you just want to finish it, but if you want to stray from the normal path and try to get one of the special items and secrets, you get a taste of the real, unadultered Bionic Commando experience. And that implies pulling your hair out and scream angry expletives at the screen.

I'm not exaggerating if I say that I died 50 to get a single item (a helmet in those *%@! secret tunnels), and I just can't imagine how it could be even possible to get it before the patch. What a nightmare!

But other than that, the game is a lesson about how to remake a game. It's excellent in every sense, starting with that classy retro-modern intro (the music is so good that I'm not surprised that the musician was promoted to creative director of the game). Other remakes should look up to this game.

I still haven't tried the full-blown Bionic Commando game, but as an appetizer, this one is great. It kind of makes me sad that its developer, Grin, went under. I kind of understand when people who make terrible games go bankrupt, but Grin was doing interesting and playable stuff, I think. Well, I still haven't played Wanted and BC, but I will, and I'll tell you more about it.

Later,
Danda :)

Fallout 3, BSG and modding in BASIC

Hey Danda,

So whatever disease it is that is being bred here in these offices, it got to me and I was sick all day Wednesday. I stayed home, drank hot tea and played Fallout 3 all day. Now I'm hooked. It's so much more gripping than Oblivion for some reason. I love it. I also played it half the day yesterday. And as I was trying to finally fall asleep later that evening, I had this beautiful idea that Bethesda should make an RPG based on... Battlestar Galactica! How awesome would that be? You could start off with missions on the Battlestar and then later in the game progress to some planet or another, and your karma could decide whether you'll end up, say, making peace with the Cylons or not. Ooor every new start of the game could have other people turn out to be Cylons. But even without that, it could still be awesome. And I'd be hoping there'd be no Uncanny Valley problems with their rendition of Starbuck. :)

Someone should make a BSG mod for Fallout 3. I should learn how to mod. Hey, I'll do it in BASIC!

10 make Wasteland look like Caprica

20 make character look like Starbuck

30 make Megaton look like the Battlestar

40 make monsters look like cylons

50 simulate awesome gameplay and dialog

60 be awesome

70 goto 10

The one negative thing about Fallout 3 is that you can't advance past level 20, unless you get the downloadable content. Monster slaying is only half as fun if you don't get experience points. But it takes a long time to advance that far, so it's not that bad.

At any rate, it's a great game, and I recommend you play it, too!

Game on,
- SuperViv

Switch - Cambio

We are switching this blog to English-only entries, and we'll be experimenting with the epistolary style. Don't be shocked if new entries look like private emails... because they are!

We are just starting, and we'll appreciate your feedback to find our way. Thank you.

------

Vamos a empezar a publicar entradas escritas sólo en inglés, y experimentaremos con el formato epistolar. No os asustéis si los nuevos posts parecen emails personales... ¡porque lo son!

Este blog acaba de nacer, así que agradeceremos vuestras opiniones para saber por dónde tirar. Gracias.

God of War HD

Sony rips a page from Nintendo's book and has announced a new HD PS3 release of the original God of War titles.

It would be much better if they also offered full retrocompatibility for the PS3. You can still play the Gamecube version of Metroid on a Wii, and nobody expects it to hurt the Metroid Prime Trilogy sales at all!

*******************

Sony copia las tácticas de Nintendo y ha anunciado una nueva edición en HD para PS3 de los dos primeros juegos de God of War.

Sería mucho mejor si también hubiera retrocompatibilidad total para la PS3. Es posible jugar al Metroid Prime de Gamecube en una Wii, y eso no va a quitar a nadie de comprarse la Metroid Prime Trilogy.

Slim PS3, at last!

The new slim 120 Gb PS3 has been oficially announced, at last. This will surprise nobody, as Sony had no choice but putting a cheaper PS3 on the market.

I already have a 80Gb Playstation 3, and I'm happy with it. I use it to watch Blu-ray movies more than anything, but it copes well with videogames. Maybe it has the same problem the Amstrad had during the 80s "8-bit war" in Europe: more people were creating games for the Spectrum and putting more effort in it, so the inferior system had better games. I'm not saying the Sony console is better, but it's not inferior (just take a look at Killzone 2), and I don't think there's any technical reason that explains why it's getting worse versions in every multiplatform release.

Good news for casual core gamers, anyway...

************************

SPANISH: Al final se ha anunciado oficialmente la aparición de la PS3 "slim" de 120 gigas. A Sony ya no le quedaba más remedio si quería comerse un rosco...

Ya tengo una Playstation 3 de 80 gigas que compré el año pasado, y estoy muy a gusto con ella. La uso sobre todo para los Blu-rays, que se ven de vicio con mi proyector, pero no tengo ninguna queja con la forma en que funciona con los juegos. Killzone 2 ha demostrado que técnicamente es capaz de mucho, y si los juegos multiplataforma son siempre inferiores en PS3 será posiblemente por lo mismo que los juegos de Spectrum solían ser "mejores" que los de Amstrad: porque hay más gente con Spectrum, y nadie se curraba las versiones para el CPC, pese a ser un ordenador muy superior. Y claro, ahora todos los jugones empedernidos tienen la Xbox 360...

En cualquier caso, la aparición de este modelo ligero a un precio "reducido" es una buena noticia para los jugadores casual core...

Alone in the Dark: Inferno

Alone in the Dark: Inferno is a great game. If you have the opportunity, play it on the PS3, and consider any previous releases to be "beta versions". This is just another excellent game which was killed off by Atari's stupid policy of releasing unfinished games (like the also great Boiling Point -the game that FarCry 2 wanted to be and wasn't-, or the abysmal Driv3r).

Why do I think that?

-The "TV season" idea (soon to be adopted by Alan Wake, too) is great, and is done well. If you are really stuck, you can just hit the "fast forward" button and that's it. And it allows you to divide the game in reasonable chunks (I mostly played an episode per day, after getting home from work).

-It's not your run-of-the-mill action game. Actually, it's an adventure game in disguise. You have to face a series of independently-playable scenes and in most of them, you can't proceed until you come up with a way to solve a contextual puzzle. You have to use your brain here (or hit the FF button...)

-It's not a typical case of "famous title with no connection with the original game whatsoever". It's not exactly a sequel nor a reboot, but a mixture of both things, and it also understands that shooting is not the most important thing in the game.

-It's not punishing. Items are there when you need it, and in many cases they even respawn so you don't end up stuck because you missed a decisive molotov cocktail throw.

-You can't actually get all the achievements/trophies and have a life. I got every one of them but three in a single playthrough, and then I got the rest in just ten minutes.

Don't buy the negative hype about this game. Yes, the previous releases were unplayable in many different ways, but the game is actually great.

And while you are at it, play Boiling Point too! Now it's cheap and there are patches to make it playable.

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Alone in the Dark: Inferno, es un juego muy bueno. Si tenéis la oportunidad, jugad la versión definitiva de PS3. Las anteriores son a efectos prácticos una "beta". Se trata de otro juego más que fue destruido por la estúpida política de Atari de sacar a la venta juegos inacabados (como "Boiling Point", el juego que "FarCry 2" quiso ser y no fue, o el infame "Driv3r").

¿Por qué opino así?

-La idea de presentar el juego como una temporada de una serie de TV (algo que pronto copiará "Alan Wake") es muy original, y está bien llevada a la práctica. Si te atascas y no consigues superar la situación, sólo tienes que darle al botón de avance rápido. Y te permite dividir el juego en sesiones de duración razonable (lo normal para mí ha sido jugar un capítulo al día al volver del trabajo).

-No es el típico juego de acción. En realidad, es como una aventura gráfica camuflada. Te enfrentas a una serie de situaciones autocontenidas en las que no puedes avanzar hasta que no se te ocurra una forma de enfrentarte a la situación. No vale la fuerza bruta.

-Es una continuación del AITD original, no una "reimaginación". O más bien es un término medio entre ambos, pero se agradece que no escupa sobre el original. Y también entiende que pegar tiros no es lo más importante del juego.

-No es injusto con el jugador y es generoso con los objetos, que están cerca de donde se necesitan y en muchos casos reaparecen para que no te tires de los pelos por haberte quedado sin munición o explosivos en un momento delicado.

-Puedes conseguir todos los logros/trofeos en una sola partida. A mí me quedaron tres, pero los conseguí en menos de diez minutos accediendo al capítulo adecuado en cada caso.

No os creáis la publicidad negativa sobre este juego. Es cierto que las versiones anteriores eran injugables de muchas formas distintas, pero lo cierto es que el juego es excelente.

Y ya que estamos, ¡jugad al "Boiling Point"! Eso sí, instalando los parches antes...

Welcome - Bienvenidos

ENGLISH: This blog intends to represent a segment of "hardcore gamers" who have managed to have a life beyond their PC or console, and no longer have the time to spend a lot of hours playing videogames. They enjoy games as a pastime, but not as a full-time occupation (like we did when we were kids), though they spent enough hours doing it to distinguish between a good game or a piece of computerized crap.

We'll try to use a personal voice here. At times this will be a "shopping guide" telling you if it's worth to buy that game or not, which is what interests most of you when you look some game up on the internet, but we'll try to say more things that may be interesting and in some cases useful to the reader/player.

Why are we starting this as a bilingual blog? Well, I'm Spanish, but the whole concept of a "casual core gamer" was created by the German translator Veronika Hoffmann. We talk to each other in English, and I would like to share this blog with her, if she doesn't consider it a waste of time.

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SPANISH: Este blog pretende representar a un segmento de jugadores "de nucleo duro" que ya tienen vida propia más allá de la pantalla de su PC o consola y no tienen tiempo para entregarse a fondo a un videojuego, como sí resultaba habitual cuando éramos más jóvenes. Los que tienen la práctica de jugar a videojuegos como distracción pero no como profesión, y aún así llevan mucho tiempo en esto y saben distinguir entre un juego bueno y otro malo.

Hablaremos aquí desde una óptica personal. Quizás a veces nos vayamos por el típico camino de hacer una "guía de compras", que es para lo que la gente busca informarse sobre un videojuego, pero esperemos que algo de lo que digamos pueda ser provechoso para el lector o jugador.

La decisión de intentar hacer un blog bilingüe, aunque sea algo totalmente insostenible a largo plazo, se debe a que el concepto de jugador "casual core" nace de la traductora alemana Veronika Hoffmann, y me comunico con ella en inglés. Deseo compartir con ella este blog, si ella no lo considera una pérdida de tiempo.