Tea Leaves

I originally planned to pick up The Orange Box on the strength of the Team Fortress 2 trailer videos. Here was a multiplayer game with some character, I thought. I was excited about it. The people who play games for me played a lot of the beta and seemed to love it, but then they all ended up playing the multiplayer on Steam instead of the Xbox, and then my Xbox melted. No Team Fortress for me.

Then a surprise happened. They all told me to play Portal. So when my Xbox came back I picked up the whole Orange Box to see what the fuss was about.

Note: Spoilers ahead. There are spoilers ahead, so if you have not played the game, go do that first then come back. It won’t take long.

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I don’t have a lot of time for games.

This may seem strange, given how much I write about them, but the fact is that I work a day job, and have a social life, and games basically fit a slim slice of time between the time I’m done with everything else – usually around 10:30 or 11 pm – and the time I go to bed.

That has some interesting consequences. First, it means I tend to dream about whatever game I was last playing (perhaps this is why I was so hard on Persona 3). Second, it means that to a fairly good approximation, I can estimate how good a game is by how late I stay up.

An average game will keep me up until around midnight. A game that is particularly well executed, such as Bioshock, can stretch that until 12:30 or 12:45. If a game is well executed and it’s a type of game I’m obsessed with, such as Fire Emblem, I might push that until 1 am or so.

On Friday night, I played Portal until 4:30 in the morning, and dreamed of blue and orange holes in space until morning. (more…)

I recently played the first eleven missions of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Nintendo Wii.

This breaks something of a tradition for me. I recently played the first ten missions of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Gamecube. Last year I played ten missions (each) of Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the Gameboy Advance. I abandoned all of those games after ten missions.

Why only ten missions?

Because – with the exception of the new Radiant Dawn game – the Fire Emblem games are a great example of games written by small-minded people who hate humanity, because they have completely punishing and broken save point systems. After 10 missions, the games got hard enough that I had to interact with the broken save system. So I stopped playing. (more…)