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