Tea Leaves

At my request, my co-writer and game pusher peterb used his Gamefly powers to obtain Assassin’s Creed for the Xbox 360 the other week. I’ve spent a couple of weeks playing it in between my long sessions of getting repeatedly shot in the head playing Call of Duty 4. To say that Assassin’s Creed is a mixed bag does not really do the game justice. After all, the game has far loftier goals than usual. So, I can’t say that my impressions of the game are merely mixed. No, Assassin’s Creed is more like an exquisitely crafted ceramic dish that someone has covered with dog shit. It is by far the most finely crafted crappy game I’ve played.
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I’ve made no secret of my love for Bay 12 Games’ Dwarf Fortress. I’ve returned to it this holiday season only to find there’s been a significant change: the game is now 3D.

It’s still a roguelike, mind you. But the environments now encompass a huge number of z-levels, which you can step through with the < and > keys.

I’m of two minds about this development. On the positive side, it brings a lot of freshness and variety to the game, and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, particularly with respect to moving water and magma about. On the other hand, the user interface of Dwarf Fortress was already fairly punishingly bad, and this isn’t helping. (more…)

Karl Hendricks, a Pittsburgh indie-rock local legend, released an EP in the early 90’s called I Hate This Party which perfectly encapsulated teen angst, the feeling of simply not understanding the things that other people like to do, and the shame that can sometime go along with it.

I hate this party.
I hate all your friends.
I hate feeling stupid.
I always do in the end.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is how I feel when people talk about what a superlatively awesome time they are having playing Popcap’s pachinko-on-crack game Peggle. (more…)

…and now I’ve picked up Disgaea 2 via eBay.

STOP ME BEFORE I BUY AGAIN.

I visited The Exchange last night, and ended up walking out with two other Nippon Ichi games, La Pucelle Tactics and Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure.

I am so very doomed.

My co-writer and I have somewhat different approaches towards games of questionable value. He approaches gaming a bit like a “catch and release” fisherman, constantly buying the newest games on a whim, playing them for a couple of days, and then selling them on eBay in a week if they don’t work out. I, on the other hand, agonize over each and every purchase, determined to hold on to my hard-earned cash to the last second.

This has its downsides. One of them is that I hardly ever sell games. If the game is good that’s fine, but I even put the bad games on the shelf, lovingly enclosed in their pristine cases, so that I can enjoy not ever playing them again. It’s a bit of a sickness.

However, my buying pattern has its upsides, too. My co-blogger doesn’t just buy too many games, he actually buys them twice. So every so often I get a free game. It’s charity, like that given to a beggar scratching at the back door of Marie Antoinette’s pastry chef.

Last week, he bought Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness for the PSP, so I got his copy of the PS2 version of the game, Disgaea: Hour of Darkness. It has taken over my life, and invaded my dreams. Perhaps by writing about it a bit I can get it out of my head. (more…)

I have a peculiar, but probably not particularly unique, habit. I like to read reviews of things after I have otherwise consumed them. I do this a lot with movies, music, books and other such “artistic” media. I think part of this activity stems from the engineer/dork need to search out validation for one’s opinions. For example, I was once thrilled to find out that the Trader Joe’s red wine that I had bought was also enjoyed by the wine critic on The Splendid Table. We are creatures of ego, we can’t help it.

This is not the only reason I engage in this behavior though. The main reason is to read interesting writing about something that I enjoyed, or didn’t, as the case may be. Of all of the media that I consume, what saddens me the most is how little interesting writing there is about video games.
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I have always liked first person shooters. For a long time they were all I played. Every couple of years I’d pick up a new one and play it for a while and then go dormant again. Being slow and uncoordinated, I have never been particularly good at shooters. In online games I am particularly useless, and my main goal is usually to not be shut out.

After the last flood of major releases in 2004, the last few years have been off years for shooters. Most of the releases have been second string franchises or remakes of second string franchises, or ports of other second and third string franchises from the PC world. This year, however, has been different.
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