]]>Over the next week or so, updates may be sparse and you may notice problems reaching the site as we prepare to move to a new content management system. Things should be back to normal relatively quickly.
]]>Several years ago, one of my favorite authors, A.S. Byatt, wrote a scathing review of the Harry Potter books called "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult." In this review she roundly criticized not Rowling, but the adults who chose to read her books. She said, essentially, that there was something fundamentally misshapen about adults who would choose to invest so many hours in a work created for children.
This is the sad truth behind literary criticism: there's a widespread belief that the craft of storytelling is not as important as the craft of writing. This is, of course, ludicrous. For the novelist, both skills are important, but I'll take a clumsy storyteller over a brilliant but boring linguist every time. When you have a great storyteller with a superb gift for words you end up with Martin Amis. When you have a great storyteller who doesn't construct brilliant sentences, you end up with Rowling. When you have a stunning linguist who can't tell a story to save her life, you end up with Donna Tartt.
Frankly, I'd rather be bludgeoned about the head with Rowling's entire body of work than have to sit through another page of one of Tartt's sickening apologias for the overprivileged. There is more depth in any one page of Rushdie's "children's book" Haroun and the Sea of Stories than in the entire body of the latest vapid favorite of the overeducated-but-shallow, Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
All of which is a preface to the point that one can have a great story and tell it in a bad way, or vice-versa, and that things written for children can be enjoyed by adults without guilt.
Which brings us to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've been pondering this game for a while now, as I play it. I won't be reviewing the game in this space — you can read my review in the holiday issue of Played To Death— but I found some aspects of the way it is constructed to be interesting, and it reminded me of Byatt's essay. Not because it's poorly written, or a bad game — I'm enjoying it immensely — but because I find the maturity level of the game to be so confusing. This isn't a game written for children. This is a game written for adults who played an earlier Zelda game when they were children.
The games in the Zelda series have always treated unapologetically in adolescent and heroic archetypes. The story of every Zelda game is this: an evil power threatens the land of Hyrule. An orphan boy, Link, is drawn in to rescue a friend. In doing so, he acquires various weapons and tools of legend (a boomerang, a magic bow, a magic sword, a grappling hook, and so on). In overcoming obstacles, he inadvertently delivers the power of the godhead to the villain. Link must then confront the enemy and defeat him to save the land.
The details in each game change, but the pattern is the same, which is fine. The previous game, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, was beautiful to look at. The characters were cartoony and iconic. Backgrounds were rich, saturated, and looked like they came straight out of a 1940's-era Warner Brothers cartoon. From a purely graphical perspective, Wind Waker was designed with a bold, uncompromising vision.I thought the Wind Waker art style was daring and wonderful. It fit the ideals underlying the world perfectly. But among many fans, this gutsy art style was a complete flop. My understanding of why is somewhat limited, but it seems to have something to do with the misapprehension that playing with things that look like children's toys will shrink one's penis. Regardless of the reasons, many people complained about this style, and one can't help but worry about the possibility that the stylistic decisions made in Twilight Princess were a direct result of this feedback.
Twilight Princess takes the basic pattern of Zelda and puts it in a "dark" world, drawing elements from a number of other games including Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and Silent Hill.
The end result is a game that is too scary for children to play, but not scary at all to adults. The fear in Silent Hill, for example, came not from the eerie music and atmosphere, but from the fact that the rusted, fecal exteriors in the game were so patently signposts pointing to the sexual and violent elements of the player's psyche. Shadow of the Colossus was disturbing because it cast the player, implicitly, in the role of a villain, of someone who becomes his own Shadow. Such possibilities are never even remotely imaginable in Twilight Princess. Link is a good guy. His Shadow is not something he would even think about becoming.As I said, my theory is that Zelda ends up in this stylistic bind because their platonic Zelda player is an adult who has played the other Zelda games. What they're trying to do, I think, is present the story as "dark" or "serious" to avoid the player shunning the game for fear of being infantilized. At the same time, they have to maintain the essential innocence of the characters, because that's what the archetype requires: evil, even evil that has tainted us, must always come from the outside. I think that the tension between these two goals resulted in a visual design that doesn't quite sit snugly on the shoulders.
Perhaps I'm simply wrong, and projecting, and really a whole new generation of 7-year olds are encountering and loving Twilight Princess. As a game, I think it is clearly the best of the series. But stylistically the game looks like a compromise to me, and it is weaker for it.
]]> Comments (9)]]>]]>Wide angle lenses, roughly speaking, are lenses that for a given image size, provide a wider than "normal" field of view in the final picture. For 35mm cameras, we generally consider lenses with a focal length of 35mm or less to be wide. Back in the day, I asked my photo expert buddy whether I should buy a 24mm lens or a 20mm lens for my wider-than-35 wide angle needs. He said if I knew what I was doing, I should get the 20, otherwise, I should get the 24. This was very wise advice.
]]> Generally, you should not buy a lens unless you have some idea what you are going to do with it. If you are considering buying a wide angle, you should ask yourself why you need to go wide.If you ask a beginning photographer this question, they will sometimes answer "I need the wide angle for those huge vistas in the landscape." Sadly, this answer is almost always wrong.
If you really want to isolate a huge vista and get that grand Ansel Adams feeling, the best thing to do is to be a few miles away from the subject and use a telephoto lens to get the picture. For example, consider this shot:
I made this picture while standing in a parking lot that was right next to the great expanse of desert and rock. If I had shot it with a wide angle, the mesa would be a little dot in the distance and the foreground would be all parking lot. You never want that.
Here is a good example of shot where the wide lens has been used to "get the whole picture", with the end result being that there is nothing of interest in the frame:
Notice how everything that might be interesting in this picture (the building, presumably) is tiny and in the background. Meanwhile, your eyes immediately focus on the foreground which is nothing but an empty green blob. There is basically nothing to look at in this picture.
This sort of mistake is easy to make because wide lenses distort front to back perspective. You must remember this: wide angle lenses make stuff close to the lens really big and stuff far away from the lens really small. It's like those rear view mirrors on cars, only a lot worse.
You use wide lenses when you want to take advantage of this distortion. For example, you might want to show the viewer something small and intimate in the foreground and but lead her eye to the background where there is a familiar setting:
Or, you might have figured out how to arrange a shot where the foreground and the background are interesting:
Finding an interesting subject and an interesting background is twice as hard as just isolating your subject against a blown out background. This is why wide angle lenses are challenging to use. Whenever you are trying to control more than one main element in a picture, you will have a harder time.
The wide angle perspective also comes in handy when you are indoors. You might be trying to take a picture of a group of people at your house for dinner. They are all sitting around the table. You grab your trusty normal lens and start backing up to get the whole table into the shot. You have about half the people in the viewfinder when you find that you have walked into the stove and your pants are on fire.
This is when you need that super-wide angle zoom:
Of course, all the standard wide angle challenges apply. Watch out for empty foregrounds, and remember that since you will be placing so many different elements into the frame, you have to be careful to arrange them in a way that is pleasing rather than just confusing. I don't have any great insight on how to do this. I might say that in my pictures, I tend to try to maintain a strong front to back perspective with lines that lead the eye from one side of the frame to the other, but that would just be self-concious wanking. The truth is that I fool around with a lot of different things and then I attempt to remember what worked well and what didn't. Over time, you get better at doing the stuff that works and avoiding the stuff that doesn't.
Finally, here are a few other random tips:
1. Don't take close up portaits with a wide angle, unless you like making the person look like a distended freak.
2. Do take portraits with wide angle lenses if you want the background environment to be part of the portrait.
3. Remember that with wider lenses things that you place at the edges of the frame will look distorted. This can be a bit disturbing when you put your Aunt Betty in the wrong part of the picture and she gets all stretched out.
4. Be careful whenever you tilt a wide angle lens up or down. It makes the world look funny.
5. Practice, practice, practice. Edit, edit, edit.
]]>My dad used to tell a groaner of a bad joke about a guy he knew opening a cheese shop in Israel. The name? Cheeses of Nazareth.
I thought of that joke today, and on a lark typed "cheesesofnazareth.com" into my browser...and then name is owned by a domain name squatter, offering to sell it.
The Internet is full.
]]>The Holiday issue of Played To Death magazine is out. Download the free PDF now and you can read my reviews of the Nintendo Wii, The Wii's online service, Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Xbox Live, as well as many other fine articles.
]]> Comments (4)]]>]]>My rag-tag group of adventurers had just prevailed over the ghost-like sewer monster. The fight had not been too tough, although it did require some careful tactics. Having come all the way here, I figured I'd have a look around. Just around the corner from our fight was another network of sewer pipes and water ways, so we took a few tentative steps that way. From the shadows, a brown lumpy form appeared and took a swipe at me. The blow landed on my head and with one hit, the game was over. My last save was from 45 minutes back at the entrance to the sewers.
Welcome to Final Fantasy, I thought.
Madden is a football simulation wrapped up in a large scale management simulation. In Zelda, you crawl through dungeons, solve clever puzzles, find interesting items, and fight tedious boss monsters while at the same time working towards your ultimate destiny as the periodic savior of Hyrule. The Elder Scrolls games are a collection of linear quests that are hard to find wrapped up in a min-max leveling game. Halo strings together a chain of thirty second pieces of combat as you journey from cut scene to cut scene. I could keep this up all night.
It's no coincidence that game franchises work hard to maintain their core mechanics from version to version. Fans of the franchises became fans because the gameplay was enjoyable. They eagerly await the new Bloodspank game because they want the same experience as the old Bloodspank game but a new setting, or new characters, or higher resolution textures. Therefore, to keep their fans, developers strive to remain faithful to the original experience.
Which brings me to Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy, it seems to me, has a very clear two level structure that has basically remained unchanged through all twelve instances of the game. On the one hand there is the standard RPG inner loop: you fight stuff, you collect loot, you gain levels and abilities. Each game tweaks these mechanics, streamlining some while making others more complicated.
The large scale organization of the games are also similar in that they are a linear jaunt from dungeon to dungeon. Each dungeon is designed to be encountered when your party has been appropriately developed and buffed. In between dungeons, there are cut scenes.
This combination of content: the fighting, the dungeons, the cut scenes, is what keeps people coming back to the game. For whatever reason, people like working through these little obstacle courses in a quest to watch the next cartoon.
The tricky thing in this game is that sometimes difficult areas are interleaved with the areas that are safe, and it's hard to tell when you've gotten yourself lost and are about to be punished for it. This happens repeatedly to me in FF12 whenever I venture even the tiniest bit off the shiny rails that the developers have built for me to follow.
What I discovered this week was that this problem seems to have inhabited every FF game ever built. Because being punished over and over again on my PS2 wasn't enough for me, I picked up the recent reissue of Final Fantasy III for the DS.
I played through the intro. No problem. I got into the first town and looked around. No problem. I walked out into the overworld and ventured north, not knowing that I had missed the cut scene that told me to venture south. Thirty seconds later, two wolves in the woods crushed my head like a grape. Even after almost twenty years of development, if you are playing Final Fantasy, you are never more than a few steps away from a one hit kill.
Besides this long standing structural problem and an annoying lack of savepoints before boss fights that I tend to lose, I have generally been enjoying FF12. The streamlined combat takes a lot of the tedium out of the RPG inner loop. For once the writing, and overall production of the outer loop isn't cringe inducing. Even the voice acting is pretty tolerable.
So, I'm looking forward to spending the next few weeks beating up creatures from the nightmares of Japanese children, picking new abilities out of a large checkerboard, trying to min-max my character development and watching cut scenes. I think I'll put off the side quests for now though. In Final Fantasy, you can't be too careful.
]]>I showed up at Target a few Sundays ago and stood in the cold for about an hour to try to get a Nintendo Wii. I had number 42. Unfortunately, they only had 41 of them.
Ouch.
Through some machinations and good luck, however, I managed to pick up a Wii the other weekend. My "real" review of the box (and some of the games) will be in Played To Death's holiday issue, but I have a few philosophical ponderings to share here.
The console itself is nice looking (if a bit bland) and petite. The control is odd. It manages to be both more precise and less accurate at the same time: I'm constantly astonished that the cursor managed to hit what I intended, but even with the remote braced against a hard surface, the cursor always seems ready to slip away from me like the fish in Fool's Errand. The ergonomics of the controllers themselves, though, are great. Nintendo deserves praise if for no reason other than liberating us from the Playstation-style dual-handed rosary. Friends and family who would never touch an Xbox seem to have no problem with the Wii: the remote is approachable, and everyone who has ever used a mouse is familiar with "Move your whole hand this way to move the pointer."
If they can manage to make enough of them, I think we can state confidently that Nintendo has defeated Sony in hand-to-hand combat for this round of the console wars. They've basically taken a Gamecube, revved it just a little, and given it a nifty control scheme. They combined this with an interesting smattering of launch titles taken from their console legacy (Zelda) and their handheld library (Trauma Center) Then, they are selling this device for just about one-third of what Sony is charging for a larger, heavier, uglier device that has features no one wants and games no one cares about. Basically, Sony has managed to use all of their engineering and marketing prowess to launch a new version of the Atari 5200, only with fewer games. Nintendo, meanwhile, has done something practically unheard of in the console space: they've innovated.
What's particularly saucy about Nintendo's innovation is that it is in your face. Game publishers, as I have mentioned before, hate and fear innovation. Microsoft's decision to include a hard drive in the original Xbox cost them millions of dollars, and the only reason they did it was the game publishers, lying like pregnant Catholic schoolgirls, swore up, down, left, and right that they would make games for the Xbox that could only work with a hard drive. Then they treated the hard drive like a glorified memory card for the life of the console, and ported all their games to the PS2. With the Wii, Nintendo has placed the innovation right in the user's hand. There is absolutely no avoiding it.
There will be game developers who make games for the Wii that don't actually use the controllers in any interesting way. These developers will be sad, because no one in the entire world is going to buy their games. If you release a game for the Wii that doesn't use the controller in some interesting way, legions of twentysomethings around the world are going to stop referring to your company by its trademarked name, and will instead just use the shorthand "those retards."
Of course, many of these games will fail, because often users hate innovation too. But at least when you fail you will have failed in an interesting way, rather than boring us with yet another clone of BladeHunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge (motto: "Now with Bump Mapping!")
So, in summary: Microsoft's innovation in this cycle centers around online play. Sony's innovation centers around making their game machine stupidly expensive so that it can play movies. Nintendo's innovation centers around their wireless motion-sensing controller. No one can promise us that future Wii games will be any good.
But for now, I have an Xbox 360, and I have a Wii, and I have no intention of buying a PS3 any time in the next year.
And I bet I'm not the only one.
]]> Comments (5)]]>]]>Some weeks are made for long and thoughtful articles. And some are just made for top 10 lists.
In the queue: Nintendo Wii, ¡Viva Piñata!, and an assortment of other games. But for tonight, we have monkeys.
21. The favorite monkey who's friends with the dominant monkey (pdinda)
20. The monkey who's right (pdinda)
19. The monkey who makes sure all the other monkeys around them are happy (jch)
18. The monkey with the Stilton (psu)
17. The monkey with the biggest, brightest fluorescent ass (scottd)
16. Monkey at the top of the tower with the sniper rifle (jch)
15. Monkey who has to pretend to know everything (jch)
14. The monkey with the Covenant energy sword (psu)
13. The monkey that stole my lantern (peterb)
12. The nameless monkey (psu)
11. Heartwarming monkey with Down's Syndrome (jch)
10. Code monkey (peterb)
9. Shit-flinging monkey (jch)
8. Monkey who reads my weblog and finds a comment written by a chick he doesn't know and then sends her email asking her out. I hate that fucking creepy monkey. (peterb)
7. The monkey whose smile always seems just a little too forced (roc)
6. Naughty monkey (peterb)
5. The giant invisible and omnipotent monkey in the sky who loves you but needs money (pdinda)
4. Peter Nesmith (dlc)
3. Grammar monkey (psu)
2. Free monkey in the box of cereal (jch)
1. The monkey who replies to your email in under a minute, proving he has nothing to do except check email over and over and over again in the hope of receiving tasty pellets (roc)
]]> Comments (0)]]>]]>Wikipedia may have a longer list, but here at Tea Leaves we know that size doesn't matter. Much.
19. The Slab Apricot (peterb)
18. Toad in the Hole (jch)
17. Chicken Tikka (rajesh)
16. Bubble and Squeak (jch)
15. Cherry Tart (peterb)
14. Dublin coddle (rlink)
13. Black and Tan (peterb)
12. Apple Turnover (rlink)
11. Pumpkin. (baird)
10. Hot mustard pretzel (mwm)
9. Pigs in a blanket (mwm)
8. Hand Roll (peterb)
7. Over hard / Over easy (rlink)
6. Forcemeat (rlink)
5. Head cheese (mwm)
4. Jelly Roll (peterb)
3. Hot Toddy (rlink)
2. Banana Split Brownie Pizza (mwm)
1. Bangers and Mash (rlink)
]]> Comments (4)]]>]]>I've been watching some football in HD on my big TV this year. Since all HD broadcast options at this time in our history are about as appealing as drinking sewage for lunch, I've been doing it over the air. Today my antenna would not pick up FOX, so I watched the game on my Tivo instead. As a result, I missed much of the experience of the live broadcast.
]]> 1. The 10 minutes of commercials on either side of a score as they cut away after the extra point and after the kickoff.2. The interminable video reviews due to challenges or "booth" reviews. The replay rules in the NFL are the dumbest thing to be added to a sports rulebook since they made zone defense illegal in the NBA. They fixed the zone rules in the NBA, the NFL should fix this too.
3. The "reporter on the field" segments. Who are these reporters on the field? This has to be the dregs of the dregs as far as a position in sports broadcasting is concerned.
4. Promos for intellectually offensive series TV on Fox (or CBS). The best are the ones that involve decapitated bodies and bloody stumps in the promo during "family" viewing time.
5. The dozens of on-the-field time outs. The recent fashion here is to call a time out milliseconds before the opposing team snaps the ball for a field goal, so they have to set up and run the whole play again. In the future, doing this should result in an automatic 3 points for the team kicking the field goal and they should be able to run the play again.
6. Bud light commercials.
7. Random booth chatter between plays and after the TV timeouts.
8. The two minute warning. What is this for? Are we really saying that 60 grown men can't figure out that there are two minutes left in the game?
9. The endless animations of the some combination of the NFL logo and the network TV logo.
10. Those touching "get to know" the player segments where we find out that the quarterback's favorite band are the Dixie Chicks and he hangs out in leather S&M clubs with his wife and mistress in his spare time. I made that up.
All of this probably accounted for an hour out of a 3+ hour broadcast. It's really too bad that I lost all of this because my antenna didn't work right. I wonder if it's working now. I wonder when there will be an HD Tivo solution that doesn't require a budget the size of the Department of Defense to acquire.
Capitalism has failed me again.
]]>It's the United Atheist Alliance that has the correct answer to the Great Question. Science damn you!
]]>Clearly the end of the world is upon us. Not only did the New York Times review the new PS3 this week, but in doing so they quoted that bastion of high quality online gaming journalism: Joystiq. The rest of the review went on to skewer the machine. The main complaint? The online service is clunky and hard to use.
]]> I found this odd. Now, I'm as much of a fan of online interactions as anyone. I buy most of my CDs and books online. I sit and chat with my friends online. I spend too much time wanking on this web site. But as far as games are concerned, I just can't get excited anymore. It's pretty rare for me to actually take advantage of multiplayer gaming in Xbox Live these days. This was not always the case.When I got the first Xbox, XBox Live was a great thing. Every couple of nights, eight of us would get on and kill Counterstrike bots for a few hours. The integrated friends list, private servers and the nice invite system made this easy.
After about six months of this, the whole thing died down and has never picked up again. There were two basic reasons for this.
1. People moved. A core group of Counterstrikers now live in the wrong time zone. This makes it hard to pick up a game.
2. People bought different games. Halo 2 and Splinter Cell were the big ones. But not everyone liked to play these games in the multiplayer. Splinter Cell in particular is hard to get into. You die a lot. A lot of people now spend most of their time online playing WoW. I bet this is not an insignificant effect.
As a result, I stopped playing games online. This is because of the Fundamental Theorem of Online Gameplay:
Playing online with people you don't know sucks.
This cannot be overstated. Sturgeon's law applies here in triplicate. 99.99% of everyone you meet in a random online game are racist, immature, illiterate assholes. Therefore, it is only worth playing with people that you know or have had previous interactions with to indicate that they are not racist immature illiterate assholes.
The result of all this is that while I appreciate the design and execution of Xbox Live, and the friends list, and the invite system, the truth is I hardly ever use it. Even when there is a great game to try out with my friends (Gears of War), it hasn't really come together. I did manage to participate in some chainsawing goodness with the people over at GWJ, thus avoiding the fundamental theorem. But even though some in the old Counterstrike crowd have had the game for more than a week, we have not been able to try out the co-op or get into a nice team killing match.
These days, my main use for Xbox Live is downloading game demos so I am sure to never buy another Ubisoft Shooter. All I really need for this is a net connection and a browser interface. No friends list, no online co-op, no developer time wasted on multiplayer modes that are nowhere near as good as Halo anyway, no "gamer points", no "achievements". What the hell are achievements anyway? In other words, it seems to me that most of the extras in Xbox Live are just fluff around a core functionality that is hard to care about anymore.
So while there are many reasons to not buy a PS3, a clunky online interface is not one of them. Both Nintendo and Sony will have time to put some polish on their download systems, and that's all most people will really care about in my opinion. Because ya know, everyone has exactly the same needs as I do.
]]>I've written about it before, but every year around Thanksgiving, Susan Stamberg gets on NPR to pimp her family's disgusting cranberry relish, and so I feel that it is my duty to protect my readers: Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish was revolting the first time it was made, it was revolting the last time it was made, it is an inherently revolting recipe and if you make it, and claim to enjoy it, you are an overprivileged and self-deluded yuppie wretch.
Make my relish instead. Happy Thanksgiving!
]]> Comments (1)]]>]]>With the Wii and the PS3 sold out, I sat down for a peaceful weekend with games I had already bought. For the 360, I had been itching to play a decent shooter, and with some trepidation I picked up Gears of War. I'm happy to say that it doesn't suck.
]]> The hype for Gears of War was overwhelming. When the game finally arrived, the press for it made me nervous. While the reviews were overwhelmingly positive, there seemed to be a subtext in each one that was telling you in code that the game was no good, but that the review had to be good because this was the game that would justify the existence of the Xbox 360.After playing the game for a week, I am ready to say that the game does what a good shooter must set out to do: the shooting is fun. The pacing and combat in the game is well implemented, if a bit repetitive. The core mechanic is pleasingly tactical, especially in the multiplayer. You scoot from place to place, keeping your head down, biding your time until the enemy pops out of cover and lets you shoot it. Then you open up and make things blow up. When you do this right, you get a pleasurable little rush.
When a shooter gets the combat right, you can forgive it a lot of problems, and this is the case with Gears. So now I get to complain.
The AI is not great. There are stupid checkpoints. At times, the combined cover/roll mechanic goes haywire, and you end up stuck to a rock somewhere rather than rolling out of the way of an oncoming missile. This generally leads to your death and a temptation to throw the controller.
There are Boss battles of uninspired and derivative design. In one case, I ended up fighting one guy for an hour because every time I figured out how to not get killed, my stupid robot partner would get himself killed. Note to Cliffy: don't make me escort your retarded A.I characters through your stupid Boss battles.
The plot and narrative in the game barely exists. You are dropped into a bombed out city and you run from place to place shooting things until the you get to the next checkpoint. Then you rest and do it all again. There isn't much in the way of character development, but the characters are sort of fun anyway.
There are a few weird production issues. It seems to me that both the environments and the colors used to fill them in are overly bland. The blood effects looks cartoony and stupid. Finally, the sound effects are too loud and annoying. Even if you turn the audio down, every once in a while some grunt will vomit loudly in your face. This is annoying.
The game is on the short side. I'm already into the last chapter after less than a week. That's very fast for me. The multiplayer and co-op will be good for some replay. But, for a game that is supposed to be Halo until the next Halo comes out, they could have at least implemented a decent matchmaking system. The multiplayer lobby in this game is a crippled mess. Once you get in a game though, the multiplayer is a nice change. The game rewards good team play and good tactics, and there is no respawn. It's more like Counterstrike than Halo, and that's a good thing.
Overall, I am happy enough with the game that I'm not sending it to Ebay immediately. But, as a reality check, I do have to say that this game is no console-defining franchise. The flow of the single player game is not as pleasing as Halo 2, and the multiplayer is not nearly as polished.
Still, when was the last time there was a shooter on the Xbox that didn't suck? And the best part is, between matches I can play Guitar Hero 2.
Guitar Hero 2 is as good as it ever was. I can't disagree with Pete when he says that it's a better game with music that is not as good. Still, the big Rock Anthems (Freebird, etc) are a blast to play, and the practice mode is letting me get further into Hard than I could have on Guitar Hero 1. I'm 10 songs into Hard and I may yet learn how to shift my hands around fast enough to get through the rest of the sets. But I doubt it.
The co-op mode is also a blast. Pete and I were rocking out on Freebird last night and I thought our drummer really would explode.
In summary, Gears of War is a great core shooter wrapped up in a shell with some problems. Guitar Hero 2 is more fun than should be allowed to be packaged into a single DVD.
Now that that's out of the way, I can start on Final Fantasy 12.
]]> Comments (8)]]>]]>Having observed three or four launch days in my short time dabbling with computer games, I will never quite understand the psychology of it. It seems like gamers have a sort of bi-polar passive agressive OCD when it comes to product launches.
]]> On the one hand, in the lead up to the big day you have article after article about how supply is bad, the launch titles are bad, the hardware is overpriced, the bundles are stupidly expensive, the accessories are lame, and the pack-in extras nearly worthless. None of this is surprising, because it's all true. Launch titles are notoriously bad. For some reason, the hardware manufacturers think it's a great idea to launch even though they don't have enough to sell and, you know, make a profit. Retailers have a captive audience to which they can attach arbitrary numbers of useless items while filling their coffers with the extra margins.The thing is, everyone knows this. We all know it's a scam. We all know it will be months or years before the hardware is really worth buying. So here is my question: given this, and given that the weeks before the launch are spent whining about exactly these problems, why is it that on the day itself, you find people waiting in line in the snow, in the rain, in the cold, in the mud, 9 months pregnant, and then getting shot just to get this piece of hardware that apparently no rational being on the face of the earth should have any interest in actually purchasing?
Why then can you flip a new PS3 on Ebay for $2500?
Why all the collective suffering over something that according to the news reports two weeks ago, nobody wants?
Can anyone answer this question for me?
Anyway, good luck on Sunday with the Wii.
]]> Comments (4)]]>