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Dead Money:

I played this one months ago so everything’s a little bit fuzzy. Here’s what I do remember.

I actually kind of liked this one. The main complaint everyone seemed to have was the hologram stealth parts and finding the instant death radios, but I counted a total of 5 holograms and I thought running into a room, taking a quick look around, and running back before my head exploded was a good break and kept things tense. I also didn’t mind losing all of my stuff at the beginning of the quest and actually started storing all of my gear before heading into the other DLCs, just to make things fair and try out all the new guns.

Anyway, this one has you running through a dead city filled with poison gas, tons of traps, and reanimated spooky men with gas masks who you need to dismember to kill. The story is that Veronica’s old mentor went batshit and started kidnapping people to help him break into Charlie Kane’s private vault full of technology and heavy ass gold bars you can sell for 10000 caps (which you’ll need for the other DLCs). The new weapons are pretty basic, except for a holo rifle that’s pretty sweet, but I didn’t have enough energy skill to mess around with it so I stuck to my bear trap gauntlet so I could rip guys up.

Like I said, I liked the whole spooky survival horror thing they tried on with this one and I enjoyed the whole stealth and frantic collar beeping. I loved the new characters and thought Elijah was a great crazy villain. They also managed to make the city a huge confusing maze that completely negates your little compass friend and lets you feel like you’re really exploring. My only complaints are that you can’t go back after you finish and the final part is a bit bugged (can’t sneak out with a stealth boy, have to take the long way around no matter what). Other than that, great add-on, but like I said lots of people hated this one.

Honest Hearts:

Ugh. Boring as shit. The story is Caesar’s old bloodthirsty general and some other pacifist Mormon are babysitting two tribes and trying to deal with a third tribe of assholes. This one mainly adds tons of recipes and brings in tommy guns (yes!). Other than that, you’ll be exploring a barren park killing geckos, bears, and assholes. If you were ever really interested when people from the regular game would talk about the Burned Man or wanted to learn more about how Caesar came to power then go ahead. Other than that, I can’t really recommend this one. The end is pretty cool, but I feel like they did this just to add tribals and give themselves some cred.

Old World Blues:

Hell yes. Even if you hate the idea of DLC and everything it stands for, this is just something you have to try out. It’s heavy on the dialogue (It has Doctor Venture as a disembodied brain! Walking eyes!), but it is all gold. The entire quest is just a giant, campy sci-fi map with science gone amok. The weapons are all amazing (A minigun with a dog’s brain that barks and growls when enemies are near! A super stealth suit that auto-injects med-x and increases your sneak speed! Energy axe that freezes robots!), there’s some sweet bosses, tons of mini bosses and places to explore, and the characters are great. It also ties into Dead Money and Lonesome Road a little bit, so you can pick up Elijah’s super powered laser rifle and go to town on reanimated medical suits and robot laser scorpions.

You get kidnapped (again) and have your brain, spine, and heart removed and replaced. It’s your job to gather the tech to get you into the FORBIDDEN ZONE so you can smash the evil doctor and save your brain. Like I said, the story is campy and ridiculous and is probably the only time this game really got me to laugh.

Lonesome Road:

A little bit weird. This one actually gives your character (and ED-E) a backstory and all the stuff that should have been included in the game in the first place. Another courier named Ulysses wants you to see how you fucked up his life before he kills you. It’s not BAD but it’s just a little too late to be telling me exactly who my character is after I’ve already conquered Nevada. There’s a fun little mini-quest where you need to find a bunch of warheads to explode with your laser pointer to open up secret areas and kill crazed legion/ncr and a lot of room to explore and check corners for special items.

There’s not that many new weapons, but they are awesome. There’s a sweet rapid fire rocket launcher the game almost forces you to use by shoving ammo in your face, a copy of Legate’s sword, an insanely strong deathclaw gauntlet called Fist of the North Rawr (hell yes) that just ruins everything, and auto-stims. By now I was level 49, so I spent most of the time throwing mines everywhere and sniping people with rockets (it was awesome, but having 20 explosions on screen makes it almost impossible to aim after you start shooting). ED-E also gets some amazing upgrades (free 50% weapon repair once a day, free ammo once a day, anywhere workbench/ammo loader) and they do their best to make him adorable.

The quest ends with a pretty sweet boss fight and then opens up 3 optional full on combat areas (one of them has about 10 deathclaws and 20 underlings that all rush you and your rockets). It’s a pretty good DLC and feels way more satisfying than the Hoover Dam battle, but it’s still a slap in the face for the game to start telling me who my character is all of a sudden.

Quick Summary:

Dead Money – Positive
Broken Hearts – Negative
Old World Blues – Positive!!!
Lonesome Road – Positive

FEAR 2 isn’t like that at all. FEAR 2 is the friendliest shooter in the world. For one thing, the checkpointing is excellent, never requiring you to replay more than a single encounter – though you might never know it, since even on the hardest difficulty, you’ll only ever die in a handful of places. (Contrast this with Call of Duty on Veteran, where you’re expected to die at least once on every checkpoint just to figure out which way you should be sprinting to reach the next trigger volume.) And unlike most spooky haunted shooting gallery games, the corridors in FEAR 2 are (relatively) bright and colourful, while the rooms often fulfill recognizable human purposes (such as laundry, or waiting), making it difficult to get completely turned around the way you might on a sufficiently-advanced spaceship.

The use of colour and brightness extends beyond the environments. Activating bullet time (called here… hmm… bullet time, I guess?) causes enemies to glow and pulsate. Item pick-ups are framed by a colour-coded “you-can-interact-with-me” square that’s visible even through walls. Even the collectable story-expanding text logs are not so much hidden as placed to encourage exploration; I finished with 69/70, and finding the last one was a simple matter of consulting the mission select screen(!), which displays the number of collectables in each level(!!) and tracks which ones you’ve found across playthroughs(!!!). (Of course this is all stuff that platformers have been doing for twenty years, but most shooters still tend to treat their collectables as an afterthought – something to be wedged in dark corners to fill out a features list, and yet another way for the level designer to punish you for not being clever enough to think exactly like him.)

FEAR 2 is a game almost completely devoid of rough edges. You’ll finish it in a weekend, completing every optional goal along the way, and you’ll have a reasonably entertaining time doing it. It’s unrelentingly earnest and cheerful in the way that Dead Space is unrelenting bleak and disgusting; it saves its obligatory subway tunnels for near the end, and when it finally makes you climb on a turret to fight off waves of baddies, it at least has the decency to fire up some generic heavy metal gun-shooting music for accompaniment (not a patch on the industrial track that played as you shot a hundred ghosts in slow motion at the end of FEAR 1, mind, but appreciated nonetheless). Monolith has been treading the same ground – ruthless corporations, unethical pseudoscience, blood-stained urban slums, gigantic sprawling parodies of real buildings, faceless soldiers working hand-in-hand with unexplained zombie guys – since at least as far back as Blood II, and they’ve clearly got it down pat by now.

Verdict: If you like Doom clones, this one is on the high end of mid-tier. Positive!

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Jerry Whorebach

Jerry Whorebach was consulted on what roles the characters ought to take. Before he was deported, this is what he presented.

LOU KANG

- Louis “Lewey Kay” Kang

- Earthrealm fashion designer

- travelled to Outworld in search of new materials

- found instead the perfect models – crucified human slaves

- fights to free “his people” (as in “Have your people call my etc.”)

JAX

- Abel “Apple Jax” Polanski

- granted the power to choose any form he desires

- chose “black guy with bionic arms” as it was most physically potent form he could imagine

- although posesses the capacity, has never attempted another form (“Once you go black etc.”)

JOHNNY CAGE

- comes from a future where Johnny Cage never died, instead going on to win the tournament and procreate more than any man in history

- as a result, everybody in the future looks like Johnny Cage and is named Johnny Cage

- this Johnny Cage had only moments to escape in a time machine before the temporal disturbance caused by Johnny Cage’s death rewrote the timeline

- still a tragic character, knows even if he wins he will have to fuck 10,000 women, any one of which could be his own grandmother

- did I mention he’s gay, bam double tragedy

KINTARO

- originally conceived for MK II as half-man, half-tiger

- final mixture was closer to 99% Goro, 1% tiger stripes

- apparently prototype fursuit “looked retarded”

- my design: 98.5% babe, 1% tiger stripes, 0.5% bikini

- bikini number possibly too high?

BARAKA

- is a Muslim now

- everything else pretty much the same

- has potential to be most controversial change

- should be handled with sensitivity

LEX LUTHOR

- not technically an MK character

- so well-integrated into story and gameplay of MK vs. DC, it’s now impossible to imagine a new MK without him

- possible trademark violation

SOME NINJAS

- tag-team of six colour-coded elemental masters who live in a van

- must return to van to “tag out”

- mysterious; may in actuality be as many as six guys or as few as one

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Diamond Mind Baseball 9 by Imagine Sports

I once tried to get everyone to talk about their favorite games, or what they consider the best games ever made are. Fussbett once said, “I don’t consider competitive multiplayer games to be part of this discussion at all because they rely on so much outside of the initial design of the game: your competition day to day, your skill level, the community, and ongoing developer support. Those are less interesting discussions too, as they just boil down to ‘the game you were good at so you spent a lot of time on” or “the game people played in your dorm’.” Fussbett is a wise man, and this is totally what’s going on with my love for Diamond Mind baseball. I play with a group of friends that love baseball and love Sabermetrics. Well, as much as any group of guys into Sabremetrics can feel the autistic equivalent of “love” from their parent’s basement. HURM. But Fussbett is correct — there are outside factors at play that make Diamond Mind so perfect. I am going to discuss those factors.

I need to provide some backstory, however. Our league is a keeper league, with 20 of 32 spots eligible. We only play with the American League. (So if a guy gets traded to the NL, he’s out of the game.) We hold a draft every November. We’re basically two seasons “behind,” meaning this November, when we pick, I’ll have two seasons worth of data (the real-world 2010 and 2011 seasons) on who is available. The last bit that might be confusing is one of “usage.” We play just about half as many games as the real MLB does, because Jesus Christ MLB. We can use a guy for 60% of the batters he faced (if a pitcher) or plate appearances he made (if a batter). So I can’t have Andrew Bailey of the Oakland A’s close every single game and leverage his dominating stats at a rate greater than what the A’s did for the season we’re playing through.

In four years of play leading up to this latest one, I had never made the playoffs. I… made some grevious errors in our initial draft. I took Vernon Wells in the second round when Vladimir Guerrero was still available. I had almost no left-handed bats. Drafting early each year, I had crushing disappoinments tied to high picks like Alex Gordon, B.J. Upton and Josh Beckett (who is awful every other season in real-world baseball). All that being said, in the final week of our season this year, I was barely keeping my team’s playoff hopes alive. I had to win the last two games of the regular season in order to EVEN force tiebreaker games, and in the last one I was down 8-1 going into the bottom of the eighth. I rallied in the most outrageous way possible (it is really, really hard to mount comebacks of that magnitude in Diamond Mind — just like real baseball) and scored six runs in the 8th. My guys won 9-8 when Adam Lind hit a walk-off two-run homer in the bottom of the ninth. So I am already flying high on house money. I had a game with my friend (and Baseball Prospectus author Neil deMause) and whoever won was going to go to the playoffs proper.

I’m Rochester in the recap below.

The Skydome roof was closed as the Brooklyn Ice Weasels came to play the Rochester Radiation in the second tiebreaker for playoff eligibility.

Taking the mound for Rochester was Felix Hernandez, who had a tiny bit of usage left. Lefty Joe Saunders started for Brooklyn.

Brooklyn took a 1-0 lead in the first inning as Nick Markakis singled and Justin Morneau drove him home. In the top of the second, Gordon Beckham homered deep to left center to make it 2-0. Felix struck out Markakis to end the inning, but he had thrown 40 pitches and was at 60% usage. He had to leave the game.

Joe Saunders had little trouble with the Radiation lineup initially, tossing five clean innings.

Scott Feldman started the third inning for Rochester. He let up a run in the 4th to make it 3-0 Weasels, and pitched a crazy fifth: after Adam Jones struck out: Feldman hit Morneau in the head, causing him to leave the game. Luke Scott stuck out, as did Big Papi to end the inning. A Gordie Howe Strike-Out-The-Side Trick. Only… Big Papi, no doubt apoplectic about Morneau getting beaned, unleashed a multi-lingual stream of abuse toward the home plate ump, getting himself ejected! Two enormous threats on Brooklyn were gone from the game. I’ve never seen two guys leave in such a manner in all the years of playing DMB.

Back to the game — in the top of the 6th, the pissed-off Ice Weasels hammered Scott Feldman, chasing him from the game: Jhonny Peralta doubled, Beckham walked and Markakis homered. It was now 6-0 in favor of Brooklyn.

The fans began throwing both pizza pizza and garbage plates onto the field, as it’s never really been explained how the team from Rochester plays in Toronto.

The Radiation bats woke up in the 6th inning – Matt Tolbert homered deep down the left-field line. Jason Varitek, who had been cut and re-signed multiple times over two seasons by Rochester, homered to left as well. With this, team stadium expert Neil deMause surveyed the park dimensions and said into owner chat, “Here it comes.”

Andrew Bailey entered for the Radiation and quieted the Weasels in the top of the 7th. With two outs in the bottom of the 7th, Miguel Cabrera scotched, I mean, scratched out a walk and Adam Lind homered. 6-4. Brett Cecil entered to pitch for the Icemen, but Travis Hafner lined to right and Matt Tolbert hit another home run. Tie ball game, 6-6.

Andrew Bailey induced a couple of ground outs from Chad Moeller and Jhonny Peralta in the top of the 8th. Luis Valbuena tripled, but Gordon Beckham struck out.

Brett Cecil pitched a scoreless bottom of the 8th. Matt Thornton entered for Rochester — in the top of the 9th, Howie Kendrick grounded out, Adam Jones walked, Nelson Cruz popped out and Luke Scott swung struck out.

Bottom of the ninth, and Cecil was remained on the hill for Brooklyn. Adam Lind flied out, Travis Hafner walked. Hafner took second and Matt Tolbert got to first on an error, and Jason Varitek smacked a double down the third base line to score Hafner. Rads win 7-6, thus earning them victories in their fourth-straight do-or-die game, falling behind by 7 and now 6 runs in the last two.

I’ve been playing video games since I was about five years old and my dad gave me a quarter & bar chair to shoot some Space Invaders. I’ve been playing them poorly for almost as long. Having never made the playoffs in DMB before, this is the most unbelievable, exciting and heart-pounding thing I’ve ever experienced in this hobby in my entire life.

Complete box score here.

Is Diamond Mind Baseball a great game? Yeah. Does it rise into an absolutely legendary experience with the right group of guys? Absolutely.

Ice Cream Jonsey

No, I’m just kidding, I’m not famous, or even Internet-famous, not like this goddamn cat. I’ll tell you who is, though — that cat’s owner, and one of my favorite independent film makers: Jason Scott.

Full disclosure: I was in one of Jason’s movies. But it was about text adventures, and it’s not like there’s this huge potential cast list there. He wasn’t exactly going to be able to interview Bob Saget and an Olson Twin, for instance. Although I’m sure Bob would have figured out a way to make “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” dry heave. So please let me table the transparent conflict of interest for a moment: while my childish desire for attention would have had me agree to be in one of his movies if he were stirring up a batch of frottage-fueled shag porn, many of my colleagues would have declined if he wasn’t fair, dedicated, talented and meticulous. Oh, and if he didn’t make great movies.

And he does! Look, I love documentaries that are thinly-veiled, vicious character attacks. I can’t get enough when it comes to Bluray transparent smears. Everybody loves watching Billy Mitchell be made an asshole, even though it’s probably unfair, because everything in “The King of Kong” was as fake as “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the NASA moon landings, depending on how you roll. Everyone is going to love Michael Moore ripping whoever the next Republican president is, assuming the six Navy SEALs guarding him don’t slice him up like a tauntaun after what’s sure to be a mild and unassuming winter. But the tar-and-feather doc is the documentary equivalent of a popcorn flick.

But sometimes a well-researched movie pays off. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the opposite of a popcorn flick. Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, there are movies with made-up words like “Colombiana,” which sounds like something even the Eragon cretin would have turned his nose at. But whatever those proper documentaries are called, Jason makes them, and he’s launched a Kickstarter to make three more. One on Arcades, one on the 6502 processor, and one on the medium of TAPE.

I think these are great ideas for films. I used to be an Assembly programmer for Cyrix, and together, we had some good times making you finish last in Quake. I’d put my arm around you if a processor from 1998 that lacked floating point math could “do” arms. With that in mind, programmers who worked in Assembly for systems that families actually enjoyed, like the 6502-based Apple II and Atari 800, are dying to tell their stories. The arcade documentary is about the spirit of the place, not necessarily arcade games themselves. I’m trying to purchase the cut footage of Robert Mruczek’s expansive vagina frescoes from the makers of “Chasing Ghosts,” but Jason’s replies back must have been accidentally flagged by gmail. I don’t know anything about magnetic tape, except that after the Nazis invented it in 1928, they’ve finally made enough of it to completely encircle your mom.

I’m confident that you’ll want to support these films as you learn more. Jason releases his movies via a Creative Commons license. They’re impossible to “steal.” An agreement he made with Thom Henderson let Thom host an episode of one of Jason’s previous movies, BBS: The Documentary, on-line. Click here and then click on the link that gives you the episode. I initially avoided watching the episode on PKZIP because I thought it would be the most boring story ever told, except for every episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.”

The PKZIP one is actually the best episode of the bunch. If you don’t think so, that’s cool, but if you dig it like I think you will, well, this film maker is going to create three more documentaries with proper funding. He doesn’t get anything through Kickstarter if the full amount isn’t pledged. At $33 grand each it might sound like a lot, but he’s just a guy, not HBO here. He needs to fly to find these people. There’s other stuff, as well: he funded an excursion to the actual cave that “Colossal Cave” was based on for GET LAMP. For all I know, for the TAPE documentary, he’s planning on going to the building where Watergate happened and where you liberal scum effectively stabbed America to death. I don’t think these expenses are that crazy for the product we’ll get. I put up $250 in the name of Caltrops Dot Com to support him, and I hope you will find it within you to pledge funds, too.

Ice Cream Jonsey

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Results!

7-8 Hours to beat single player on Normal.
1-2 hours to get to level 10 in multiplayer.
Totally stable the entire time, never got stuck, but a few odd glitches (you move into chaos marines when you execute them. happened 100% of the time.)

It’s OK I guess. If anything it made me more appreciative of DXHR and reminded me why I never played any of the Halos. Switching between melee and ranged feels really good, but the melee is still just right click right click right click F, right click right click right click F over and over for every weapon. You can only hold 4 weapons and your first 2 slots are always your pistol and bolter, but some of the guns just feel really really off (sniper and lascannon especially) so I just stuck with the melta shotgun and grenade launcher. The combat feels best when you’re fighting orks since the Chaos troops all tend to hide behind cover and chip at your health while a few demons attack in melee. The highlight is probably when you have a 3-way war between everyone and you just sprint into the middle with a thunder hammer. After that they start throwing bullshit shooter sections and force you to improvise cover while you have no way of healing since all the enemies are waaaaaaaay over there*. Wasn’t their whole schtick that they were breaking the Gears of War trend and making a big gun brawler hybrid? Did they scrap the plan halfway through? Is that why so much is ripped straight from the Gears of War template?

Everyone already knows the story. You’re fighting orks. Then the chaos comes. Then you fight the chaos while resisting the warp. It’s the same as every other 40K game. They try to spice it up by adding audio logs, but of all the games that have had this feature, this is probably the worst example. Part of that is probably because they’re usually a way to expand the universe and characters, but since the 40K universe is already firmly established the whole thing just falls flat. I thought giving the player history lessons on the horus heresy or how space marines are made would have been way more interesting but they were just trying to play it safe.

The whole thing is one long corridor, but it’s a pretty one, especially at the beginning. The end felt a little too purple/black and just wasn’t very impressive. The sewers came about 1/4 of the way though, I think. It was a very short section. Crates are everywhere but you can’t break them.

I was really hoping they would have some dreadnaughts/kanz, or to have a giant battle of 50 IG against 1000 orks, or some good bosses (there’s 1 “real” boss, the other 2 are you shooting down a ship and a 3 minute QTE). Like I said, they were playing it safe and really just stuck to the GoW example.

One thing I noticed is that when you’re doing the execution moves to get back health, enemies can still hurt/kill you. It does feel better than “OK time out while he kills our friend”, but it usually leaves you with the same amount of health or less if you got a long animation. You get an armor upgrade later in the game that helps a ton (all upgrades are automatic. You just find them in drop pods as the game goes on). The fury mode also gives you health, but if you use it when you’re at 50% and falling you’re pretty much dead.

Multiplayer is a hot mess. If you ever played Dead Space 2′s multi then you know exactly what to expect here. It’s not nearly as blatant and unfair to level 1 players, but the same problems are there. Everyone keeps trying to use the MW2 model without realizing that there’s a difference between earning a rifle that shoots slightly faster and more accurately and earning the demoman’s sticky launcher. Team balancing is non-existent as far as I can tell and there are only 2 modes and no last stand mode (I give it 5 months before they release it as DLC for $10). I’m also playing from Vietnam so my connection is horrible and I’ll still get shot well after I’ve turned a corner. It works both ways though so that’s not too much of a deal breaker. Plus the assault marine/raptor works fine even with terrible lag.

Overall I don’t regret my purchase and I had a pretty good time with it. Rocket jumping all over the place with a thunder hammer feels awesome. The game fails when it tries to play the battles and mechanics safely and succeeds when everything goes batshit insane. Plus it came with Darksiders so yay. I’ll probably have more fun with the Binding of Isaac though.

*It actually doesn’t happen that often but when it does you’ll hate it…

Lurker 56498

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Mild to medium cut-scene-based spoilers in the video.

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It’s an honest question. Some would say “no” because they never cared for it in the first place. Others might say no just because of the dated graphics, but there’s a high definition texture pack for Deus Ex.

The Cable Bruddas started a thread last summer where we could all talk about games that hold up or don’t. But they’ve expanded their opinions into the first Caltrops video review, presented below. With the third game in the series shipping shortly, the Bruddas discuss the merits and failures of the original.

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If you’re unfamiliar with the man’s work, Mike Stoklasa developed a character called Harry S. Plinkett (or, as we call him on Caltrops, “Stroke Guy“) and used him to savage the 1994 film Star Trek Generations. Stoklasa did such a good job, he managed to change my opinion about the movie, thus making the only time anyone’s opinion about anything was ever changed thanks to Youtube. He followed the video review of Generations by breaking his dick off into the mouth of the other Next Generation Trek flicks, and then doing the same to the three Star Wars prequels. While this was going on, the viewer gained more insight to the character of narrator Harry Plinkett. If you really shouldn’t be on the net, you found those vignettes disturbing enough to wistfully dream that the reviews stopped containing them. I don’t want to unfairly put people in categories, but everyone else who was an actual adult more or less dug them, and understood that they helped distance Red Letter Media’s video reviews from an ever more-crowded field. As it turns out, the entire time Plinkett was doing horrible things in his basement and intimately sharing them, he was prepping us for a rubber monster movie.

"Eat it with your mouff."

I was 10 when Gremlins came out, which meant I was in the theater and able to be properly disappointed for Gremlins 2. However, in much the same way that a video game becomes better when your friends are playing with you, the creative team behind Feeding Frenzy (Stoklasa, Jay Bauman and Rich Evans) have a love for rubber critter movies that probably pinballed against each other, psyching each other up. Feeding Frenzy begins by giving us insight to an average evening of Harry S. Plinkett (played by Evans). And initially, everything starts out great — we’ve got Plinkett in a scene with a call girl. Oh, I mean, it’s completely abhorrent and I modified the HOSTS file on my parents’ PC over Thanksgiving so they could never see me approve of it here, but this is pretty much everything you could hope for in the first six minutes. Then we go to the hardware store, and other people start talking.

Feeding Frenzy is an independent, amateur (not meant in the condescending way) film, and that means you’re going to see many failings of the sub-genre. The acting, on the whole, is rather poor. Most scenes look like they could have used a couple days’ worth of extra rehearsal. The less a given actor or actress has to do, the better he or she seems to come off, which is understandable for a project on what we can assume is a compressed schedule fit around the lives of its creators. The toughest jobs in the film are those of the leads, Ron Lipski and Gillian Bellinger. Lipski, playing the lead in Jesse Camp, has a lot of scenes that seem like they could have used another round of screenplay edits. Before we even begin to really know him, he’s asked to roll his eyes for a couple minutes straight. On one hand, you wish Lipski had more time to digest everything being asked of him, on the other hand, I can’t remember a flick almost immediately having such open contempt for its lead. Everybody hates this Jesse guy, and you quickly get the sense that Lipski does too.

We would love some popcorn, actually.

We get plenty of reasons to distrust and dislike Plinkett, but Feeding Frenzy takes a couple detours that don’t go anywhere. There’s a pillow fight scene, and no red-blooded man will take another to task for that. However, there is an inexplicable scene between Stoklasa (playing a separate character than he had so far) and Lora Story which is — well, it’s perfectly fine in a vacuum, but distracting as we just saw Stoklasa minus some face bandages a moment ago. I mean, I was able to successfully continue my evening and not jog and everything, but it was jarring. I don’t know if this was a homage to the genre of rubber monster movies or what. Feeding Frenzy has a weird way of making you feel you don’t have all the facts sometimes. That being said, Ms. Story could have really helped Harrison Ford as a voice coach in K-19: The Widowmaker, so there’s that.

As hard as it is to act and take direction in an indie film, the cast and crew aren’t helped by the monsters themselves. Teethy little mongrel spheres, we’re never quite clear how dangerous they’re really supposed to be. Jesse seemingly loses a chunk of his leg at one point, but the plot doesn’t call for him to really hobble. They look ridiculous, and that’s the point, but we’re never invited to be afraid of them. And I think that’s the biggest misstep of the film, except for a lot of the delivery: is Feeding Frenzy trying to elbow its way above Critters, Troll and Ghoulies? Just be alongside them, or something else entirely? Does it have no ambition in this regard? I can accept anything in a schlock genre as long as I get what I came in for and what defines the genre. Feeding Frenzy never quite reaches the point where the monsters make you uncomfortable.

All that being said, there is one scene in the movie that demands attention. I can say, quite categorically, that I laughed harder at it than anything else I can think of in recent memory. I don’t want to spoil anything, because it is so perfectly executed, so I will just say that it involves Jesse’s roommate, and it happens at fifty-one and a half minutes. It’s quietly set up throughout the entire movie and provides a delightful payoff to some earlier scenes that lacked any at the time. It’s my favorite bit about Feeding Frenzy, and completely got me on their side for the third act. Making the viewer laugh because you earned it is tough, and made me respect this movie, even if I can’t recommend it to all audiences without reservation.

This guy cracks me up, and I hope he cracks you up, too.

But look, we live in a world where there’s new and exciting art being released every week. Cash Cash came out with a new album. And… God, what a time to draw a blank. OK, wait, there’s Cash Cash, and the cops got that van Gogh sketch back from that one dumb fuck who wore loafers with no socks — what I’m saying is that there’s new stuff and we can’t even get rid of the old art. You have a lot of choices, and buying a copy of Feeding Frenzy supports all the right people. I don’t regret my purchase, and Christ, that take by Jay Bauman hasn’t stopped cracking me up yet and I’ve been watching it for the last two hours. Stoklasa, Bauman and Evans do not need encouragement from various Failed Romeros reviewing their work because you can tell this stuff is in their blood. They’re going to be fine if they keep doing these and learn from each one. I’m looking forward to their next effort, and will happily tag along provided they show passion in improving their craft each time out. Feeding Frenzy is a wonderful point to get on a roller coaster ride filled to bursting with characters and creators that get a little turned on by your puking if you haven’t already.

Ice Cream Jonsey

The Half-Life 2 series of programs have crossed paths with the wrong man!

Tdarcos

From this need, a new genre was born — the “construction kit.” The first one I remember seeing was Electronic Arts’ “Pinball Construction Set,” a program that allowed budding programmers to place bumpers at will and create their own virtual pinball tables. Pinball Construction Set would soon be followed by Arcade Game Construction Kit, Adventure Construction Set, Shoot-Em-Up Contruction Kit and Wargame Construction Set. All of these programs greatly simplified the process of creating your own programs by managing the majority of the code, allowing young game makers to focus on things like graphics, sound and gameplay.

One of the weirder additions to the “construction kit” genre was Activision’s “Complete Computer Fireworks Celebration Kit.” Dubbed “the fireworks construction kit” by gamers, Activision’s 1985 release allowed users to create their own virtual firework displays. Seriously. The Complete Computer Fireworks Celebration Kit (CCFCK) was written by Jon van Ryzin, the same man that wrote H.E.R.O.

Like any other “construction kit” program, CCFCK offers a multitude of options that allows virtual fireworks maestros the ability to customize every part of their display. Users can choose one of six backdrops (a bridge, a city, a castle, etc) and from a list of twenty songs, from The Star Spangled Banner to Happy Birthday. The program is compatible with Music Studio, so custom songs can also be imported. The fireworks displays also include text messages displayed at the bottom of the screen which can be customized as well.

And then there are the fireworks. There are several different types of fireworks than can be used, and each one can be modified using sliders, giving users the ability to alter each fireworks size, color, speed, and so on. The sliders, like every other part of the program, are controlled using a standard joystick. CCFCK requires very little keyboard interaction (other than the custom display messages users can enter).

Each event is ultimately stored on a vertically-scrolling event list. Each entry can be changed, inserted or removed. With enough time and effort, a person could theoretically synch their fireworks display up with the background music.

Once your masterpiece has been completed it can be saved to disk, where it can be reloaded or traded amongst friends (assuming they also own the program — from what I can tell, the saved firework displays are not stand alone executables).

While many people apparently have fond memories of this program, I have to admit I found the whole thing pretty boring. I mean … seriously, virtual fireworks? For a fraction of this program’s original retail cost (about $50) I could have put on a real fireworks display on in my own backyard. After ten or so minutes of messing around with Activision’s Complete Computer Fireworks Celebration Kit, I actually wanted to to turn off the computer and go outside — and that’s really saying something. I suppose kids wanting to orchestrate their own grand-scale fireworks displays might get a kick out of this title, but everyone else would get more enjoyment from simply lighting the disk on fire and chunking it high into the air.

Flack

You know it’s sad but true.

Angry Birds by Rovio Mobile

Despite the fact that “apparently no one” ever bought Angry Birds, more then 12 million copies of Rovio’s Angry Birds have been sold through Apple’s App Store. After testing the waters on other platforms such as Android and Sony’s PSP, Angry Birds has now been ported to Google Chrome.

Besides being a great browser, Google wants people to know that Chrome is also a platform. To simplify things for the laymen, Google offers the following analogy on their Chrome website : “Google Chrome OS is to Chromium OS what Google Chrome browser is to Chromium.” (Well, that’s clear.) There’s also mention of Chrome Web OS, but I’m not sure if that and Chrome OS are two different products or one and the same. The web site goes on to say that Chromium OS is “the open source project,” while Chrome OS is “the Google product that OEMs ship on Chromebooks.” Then there’s just plain Chrome, the web browser that runs on multiple platforms, including (ostensibly) Chrome OS and Chromium. What does all this mean? Hell if I know, but who cares!? They got Angry Birds to run on it.

By visiting Chrome’s web store, users of Google’s Chrome web browser (on any platform, including Windows, MacOS, and Linux) can install Angry Birds Chrome for free. I’ve been using Chrome for a year and didn’t even know there was a web store until yesterday, but according to Google over a million people have installed Angry Birds Chrome in the past week. The point of this story is, if you want to get the word out about your new highly technical platform to a bunch of technical geeks, port Angry Birds to it and … well, here we are.

Installing Angry Birds for Chrome took approximately ten seconds, maybe less. for me. Once completed, a link to the game (as well as the Chrome Web Store) appeared inside Chrome’s default “New Tab” window. Clicking the icon launches the game for me in less than a second, and selecting the “HD” version (bigger than the “SD” option) added five seconds of load time. I used to play cassette-based games on my Commodore 64 that took 30 minutes to load, so you won’t hear me bitching about five seconds.

Angry Birds Chrome appears identical to other versions of the game. If you’re not one of the twelve million people who already owns Angry Birds for their iPhone, the object of the game is to fling flightless birds using a slingshot at green pigs, protected by makeshift barriers. Points are awarded for the each pig killed and each piece of wood, rock, or ice broken. Levels are cleared by popping all the pestiferous pigs, and bonus points are awarded based on the number of remaining birds. Players are awarded one to three stars based on their scores, so clearing each level using the fewest amount of birds quickly becomes the goal. Additional birds with special powers (egg-dropping, exploding, multiplying) are introduced in later levels. While first-time players may be content to hurl their entire nest of birds to smash the enemy’s fortress, more advanced players will work to discover more efficient solutions, as many levels can be defeated with a single strategically-placed shot.

Other than the addition of a few exclusive levels, the only real difference between Angry Birds Chrome and other versions is the mouse. With the iPhone’s touch screen, birds are launched by pulling them back and “releasing” them using your finger. On Sony’s PSP and PlayStation 3, slingshots are aimed using an analog stick. Personally, I didn’t find using my mouse any better or worse than any of those solutions. I had no trouble with accuracy and didn’t seem to shoot any better or any worse than I do using other interfaces. Using a mouse is not the problem with this game.

No, the biggest problem with Angry Birds Chrome is, I can’t poop while I’m playing it. (Actually I could, but that would be disgusting.) Angry Birds is perfectly suited for gaming on the go. For bus rides, morning commutes, boring work telecons and, yes, afternoon trips to the pot, anything that can hold my attention for five minutes (ten, if I eat lunch at Pancho’s Mexican Buffet) is a win. And Angry Birds does that — it holds my attention for five or ten minutes at a time, but not much longer than that. When I’m mobile and the game is competing with boredom, it’s a winner. In the realm of personal computers, Chrome-based or otherwise, it’s competing with big boy games, e-mail, and the web.

As an advertising tool, Angry Birds Chrome is an obvious winner. Not only is it rapidly introducing Google’s Web Store to hundreds of thousands of users, but it’s showing them the quality of games that are possible in a browser. Google’s Chromebook launched this month, and I’m sure the simultaneous release of Angry Birds Chrome is no coincidence. Google is allowing developers to keep 95% of their sales revenue (as opposed to Apple’s current rate of 70%), so the more attention that a casual game such as Angry Birds attracts to the platform, the better for all involved.

Flack

It’s a good thing upper-management doesn’t know anything about video games, because if they did we’d be reading about how people in charge of LA Noire’s development got fired. They’d have been pissed to find out they spent millions on a team of people to meticulously recreate a model of 1940s Los Angeles and license dozens of songs from the time period only to find out they’re completely unnecessary and wasted. There is no reason for this game to be an open-world game at all. Even the game agrees by letting you hold down a button and skip driving to a crime scene location. There’s random street crimes you can drive to, but the few I tried were all shootouts with horrible console shooter controls and they started putting street crimes a million miles away from your location with no option to teleport there. There were also hidden cars you could find, but they added nothing to the game so who the fuck cares about finding any of them.

And on the subject of pressing a button to skip the game, I failed a really awful bulldozer chase segment enough (3 times) for the game to ask me if I wanted to skip it with no consequences at all. I’m not hot-shit game designer Shigeru Miyamoto or even pretend hot-shit game designer Tim Rogers, but here’s what I know about game design: if at any point you find yourself implementing a feature that says, “PUSH BUTTON TO SKIP GAMEPLAY,” go ahead and remove that whole section right out of the game. You’ve just admitted it sucks, so might as well take it out.

This game is also F U C K I N G R I D I C U L O U S about failure. At one point I had to choose between 2 suspects and charge one with a crime. I picked the wrong one, and literally as I was walking out of the interrogation room the police chief was standing there and started laying into me asking how I could fuck up so bad and finger the wrong guy for a crime. No passage of time, no “two weeks later.” Just interrogation room -> charge -> police chief instantly does a Macho Man Randy Savage through the wall and calls me a stupid asshole. That’s an awfully fast turnaround time in the criminal justice system. I knew the war on drugs was clogging up the legal system, but holy shit. I would have loved the option of asking the chief why he made me go through questioning if he already knew the guy wasn’t guilty. “Oh, I saw you were close to leveling and wanted to let you earn some xp ^__________________^”

I think it was IGN that mentioned supporting it for the sake of someone trying something new. Yeah, no. Maybe if it goes on sale for $19.99 you can pick it up to see what the hype was about. But it’s not really anything new. It’s 3D Phoenix Wright with a bunch of confused gameplay elements sewn together. I think there’s a good game buried in there, and maybe if they skipped creating a pointless open world and the crappy shootouts they would have had more time to find it.

Rafiki

There’s a difference between an arcade and an individual cabinet. Arcades, the place, often smell like bung. Nerds don’t bathe anywhere near as well or as often as they should, so they get their sweat on everything. I will never understand the mentality that lets guys think that a long shower at an expo or convention is optional. You’re on vacation. Time has no meaning. I’m in there rotating around like me and spam are gonna feed a dozen hungry Hawaiians.

Arcade cabinets, though, have a not-unpleasant scent like old wood and electricity. I know that’s not really poetic, but I (honestly) left my Kindle on my flight home from Oklahoma City and I was (honestly) reading Wodehouse for the first time before I lost it to prep for this. All I am left with are insipid comparisons like that one since the bulk of the weekend was spent around media that dealt with two-word commands, but I’ll get to that.

Anyway, I’ve got a bunch of arcade cabinets in my home, and I’ve had to do basic tasks on a few of them, so that scent has become inviting, and that’s what I’ll remember most about Oklahoma City. Now, I was quickly in Flack’s truck, and he’s transported dozens of games with it, so for all I know that could be why. The part of Oklahoma City where the Thunder play could very well smell like Jack Sikma’s taintfuzz.

The Oklahoma Video Game Expo has been operational since 2003. I believe they skipped 2007, but other than that, it’s been around every year since. Flack, a Oklahoma resident, gave me a heads-up about the show a few months ago, and I thought it would be a great thing to attend. Flack has countless stories about acquring retro computers and arcade machines. In fact, you can even buy his books on the Kindle. If you were on the right plane last night, you could read them on MY Kindle. I’m really more torn up about this than I thought I’d be. Who will the dead authors on the screensaver haunt now?

The OVGE welcomes vendors selling stuff, and guys just displaying things. Flack’s just recently started making text adventures. I’ve been doing it since 1999. We’d both recently finished a game (HANGAR 22 for him, Cryptozookeeper for me) so he got a couple tables at the expo so that we could not only promote our wares, but hook up a bunch of old computers running text games as well. Flack, Jeff Martin and Brian Green had the following in place as the lineup:

- A Commodore 64 running Adventureland for the first half of the show, and Questprobe Featuring the Hulk for the last half.
- An Apple II that ran Oo-Topos. (Oo-Topos, though it has one of the world’s worst parsers, is an inexplicable favorite of mine. I was completely surprised that it was there. )
- An Amiga running Guild of Thieves.
- A TRS-80 that had a built-in monitor with two floppy drives. This ended up playing an early revision (25, in fact) of Zork I.
- Laptops that ran HANGAR 22 and Cryptozookeeper.

Our expectations was that hardly anyone was going to pass the table and play games, which was fine. We’re all extremely realistic about how much interest there is in the genre these days, with the key phrase probably being >GET LOST. But Get Lamp had come out recently… there had certainly never been an interactive fiction setup at the OVGE before… and Flack, Brian and Jeff knocked it out of the house with the old computers, as those were up, working, and interesting to this crowd regardless of what they were playing.

I can’t get over how many young kids actually gave text games a shot. We were across from some stand-up arcade and pinball machines. We were adjacent to some Super Nintendos that had, among other games, Mutant Turtles ready for kids. All those stations had a lot of attention. All of those stations had more attention. But by the end of the expo, people had made it to the mid-game of Zork I. People had gotten out of the locked room in Oo-Topos, which is frigging impossible, considering the game doesn’t give you a goddamn room description if you type >LOOK. I’m terrible guessing the age of kids, but some of them aged age… nine? To twelve, maybe? Some of them aged 9-12 really saw the games as challenges to overcome, rather than relics with parsers that show a drawbridge, and then don’t allow you to raise it, lower it, look at it, or draw it.

Some games didn’t quite hold up. Someone had typed “>this game sucks” into Guild of Thieves at one point. GoT did have the most awkward interface, since Magnetic Scrolls games default to a picture taking up 80% of the screen, a stylized font that was tough to read via the Amiga’s scandoubler, and a UI that (I don’t think) you can click and grab to adjust the amount of text and graphics? Considering I thought that reviews like that would make up the bulk of what people typed in, I was delighted to see it only happen once.

I did have an experience with Crypto I’ve seen modern-day authors have before: I read through a transcript and saw that someone typed in “sing” and “boogey” while I was away. Now, there is (spoilers) no point in the game where you need to sing or get down (in that particular way). I wrote thousands of lines of code to try to anticipate what a player could do, of course. I wrote a system to allow for aiming a gun at people to stop them from hitting you — checking for the instant the gun was down — and I made it completely optional. Just in case they wanted to play it Monolith-style. But people will come up, try a couple verbs you’ve never thought of, and that’s that. It’s fine, of course — this is sort of text games’ thing. But I’ll be adding boogey as a synonym to >dance in the next game.

(It drives me crazy when people talk about an expo and the games there, and don’t mention the lineup. It’s the “can you remap the controls?” of arcade write-ups — often forgotten, always missed. Present was Donkey Kong, Donkey Kong Jr., Sky Soldiers, Pengo, Gorf, Gaplus in a Galaga cab, Gimme a Break, Tank II, Joust (cocktail), Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Pac-Man (perhaps a Ms.?) and a Neo-Geo. The pinball lineup was: Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Addams Family, Elvira, Super Mario Bros., and Mutant Turtles.)

There wasn’t quite as much retro hardware to purchase as I would have hoped for. If you wanted a 2600 or a Sega Genesis, you had options. Early in the show, Flack thought he was buying a single Apple IIGS. Due to a mistake in communication, he ended up buying the vendor’s stock. All of it. Two IIGSs, a monitor of some ill repute, and a bunch of MacIntosh stuff that I never got a bead on. I purchased an Atari 2600 BASIC Programming catridge so I could finally get Human Resources off my ass with their endless requests for certs.

I can’t stress enough how fun the show was. It was $5 admission to get in, and if it’s the sort of thing you’re into, there was plenty there. I was up late hanging out with Flack in his home arcade the night before, and we needed to be on the road by six, as the show was in Tulsa. We were starved for sleep, but there was something energizing about being around that crowd. It was an enormous amount of fun, and I’d like to think that if it took place on the same weekend next year I’d fly in from Colorado and attend again, since this way my dad will know it was intentional and not a coincidence. Props to OVGE organizer Jesse Hardesty for setting up a fun show with a really electric vibe.

Update! Here is Flack’s post regarding the show.

Ice Cream Jonsey

-The mountains of crap that gets included for playing DA:O, reading the PA comic, signing up for their newsletter, selling the most Thin Mints isn’t nearly as game breaking as the stuff in DA:O (It wouldn’t matter if it was since you have to actively try to suck to even have one of your characters die on normal difficulty. They make up for this by only giving 1 character a revive spell at the end of his personal skill tree)


-The bosses are all awesome and are a perfect challenge (too bad there’s only been 3)


-Adorable Elf with an Irish Brogue and Blood Magic


-Wizards are pretty awesome now. Maybe a little too awesome? Most battles end in 20 seconds after the adorable elf calls down meteors and consumes the corpses. Rogues are the most fun IMO.

Cons!


-Unlike DA:O where you could go to your little camp at any time and talk to all your guys and just shoot the shit, you’re only allowed to have conversations when the game says you can and throws a little quest arrow on the char’s house (they all live in separate houses across the city and there’s only 1 city and it never changes, more on that later).


-90% of the items you find are actual junk, not just the junk that can only be sold with the junk button. Get used to seeing 5-6 Rings every dungeon with something like +3% Physical Damage, +12 Attack and all named Ring just so you know it’s shit. They added a handy dandy star system where the game actually ranks items based on your level so you don’t even need to read stats anymore, just equip whatever it tells you and go.


-You can’t change your friends’ armor, only their accessories and weapons (except for the dwarf, you can’t take his steampunk crossbow away)


-There’s only 1 city and it never changes. Take Orzimmar or the human city from DA:O and add maybe 50% more and that’s the entire world. The maps themselves are tiny so get used to running across through the same slum-dock-posh square pattern over and over and over. They try to make up for it by adding a Night and Day version of each city sector, but most of the time all that does is maybe add some random enemies to the night version and doubles the places you’ll need to visit to do quests.


-Magical quest arrows aren’t just active, they’re all active simultaneously, though there are a few sidequests where you actually have to do some good old fashioned walking around. It’s just too bad it’ll be in the same 5 places you’ve been in for the past 14 hours.


-There are about 5 dungeons in the world and each is about 6-7 rooms, but they try to mix it up by having you start at different entrances and block off certain doors (to make the dungeon even shorter). Diablo did this better 15 years ago.


-Anders from Awakenings is back, but he’s no longer the fun-loving escape artist arsonist. He’s the scraggly underdog broodmaster with a dark past and a hint of danger. (Maybe this is pro for you? I remember laughing whenver Anders and the dwarf started calling each other faggots in Awakenings)


-Warriors are boring as hell to play as, do the least amount of damage, and only have 3-4 active skills and then 30 passives.


-Brooding Elf Warrior with a giant sword and beautiful white hair.


-Remember the default faces from the demo? If you kind of liked those but wanted to just alter the hair color or chin then tough shit. You can alter any of the preset faces but that one and the alternate where you have an inexplicable splash of blood across your nose like you painted it there. All of the other presets look like shit and it erases what you’ve done if you go back to look at the face they actually took time to make look good.

Story!


The premise of the game is that you go from rags to riches through a number of chapters while your dwarf buddy tells your story a la Alpha Protocol. So far the pattern is do all the optional sidequests and main quests, be warned that you can’t go back and should finish all the quests, fight through an actually unique dungeon with a cool boss, 3 years pass and you start all over. The idea is that every decision you make affects the story somewhere down the line, but unless I somehow feel the need to play through this all over again, I’ll never know how different things could be. Unlike DA:O where you had a clear goal at the end and were actually working towards defeating the Archdemon, there’s really no overarching story in DA2 other than get rich and follow the arrows.

Combat!


Combat against any enemies other than bosses is entirely just click once, then wait until everything’s dead. If you played the demo then it’s just that over and over for hours against the same enemies (humans, spiders, or undead). Normal enemies will never ever be a threat. Your best best seems to be to roll a rogue or mage and then have a party of tankgirl and then some combination of rogues and mages. Actual bosses will have you dodging attacks, hiding behind pillars, and getting beaten down to 1 character, but they’re so few and far between that you can’t really rely on them to keep your interest. I actually like the new skill system a little better than DA:O, but it’s still heavily flawed with most useful skills being hidden behind totally useless ones or skills being useless unless you sink 2 more upgrade points into them.

Overall:


Wait a year for a steam sale to put out the GOTY edition for $15 or pirate it.

Lurker 13920

When I think of DA2 I’m reeling to bring up positive things I guess I liked the NPCs, but the negatives just flow out: the main plot is only a vehicle for nerd politics, the game is full of illusory choices designed to fool retards, and the combat is the same uninspired shit they couldn’t properly port to the console with DA1. I could even be happy with a completely linear CRPG, but putting in so much effort into trying to fool me is just a waste of my already worthless time.

Dialog/NPCs

This game totally abandons branching dialog trees. It uses a radial menu like Mass Effect, but you rarely are in control of the conversation. I think there might be 3 or 4 conversations (only counting all post-fuck conversations once) that have real options, and even then you’re just answering questions not dictating the pace. Everything else is making either nice, smartass, or mean comments while you’re delivered a monologue and sometimes deciding between ‘kill’ or ‘not kill’. This isn’t bad necessarily, but if you’re going to rob me of my sole input into dialog why put so much emphasis on it? They very easily could have cut each conversation in half.

The NPC interaction and the NPCs are written really well and you almost feel like they all belong in a better game. They can be called into conversations to threaten a person or bluff, and they almost all have an interesting feel to them. The romances are lame in that everyone magically becomes attracted to you and everyone is bisexual. I think you can fuck everyone but the dwarf. They had a nice idea in Temple of Elemental Evil: Gay Marriage in a video game. Now it’s just gotten out of fucking control, it feels like they’re making dating sims for western audiences. We don’t have to fuck all our NPCs in RPGs! No one has to fuck Wrex, no one had to fuck Tali, and no one has to fuck the Mage/Rogue/Cleric Mind Flayer you’re going to include when you ruin Baldur’s Gate 3.

Combat

The combat is the same kind of MMORPG inspired stuff you had in DA1; it literally hasn’t changed at all. The status effect combining from DA1 has been ruined. In DA1 you could freeze a guy and shatter him with a strong attack, in DA2 you just get a 400% damage bonus when he’s frozen. Though that’s all the dumbing down I noticed; I’d rather the combat have been dumbed down further into something fun rather than being in the shitty limbo area they left it in.

That is probably their biggest mistake; they didn’t seriously change the combat like they did in Mass Effect 2. I’m not sure if they couldn’t think of who to copy or just didn’t care. The only change in combat is that you can tap a useless button to give yourself the illusion of control; it’s still the same shit from DA1. Of course that doesn’t stop EuroGamer from applauding the bold changes or nerds from raging about how it’s action schlock now. They changed the camera angle and everyone thinks it’s an action RPG now, so fuck it, Bioware are a bunch of geniuses.

A most of the bosses feel like shit from World of Warcraft. Certain enemies have phases and they bring down adds. Phase refers to something different based on how much health it has, and adds refer to additional enemies. So there is one fight where the Dragon flies away at 75/50/25 percent health and summons little dragons for you to fight as it shoots fireballs at you, also the fight takes longer than 15 minutes which is fucking awful. There is one specific boss who reminded me of a boss in World of Warcraft Cataclysm. It’s a dragon called Slabhide and he shoots pikes as you hide behind stalagmites. I’ve put the DA2 fight and WoW fight into youtube doubler for your pleasure. I’m not giving Blizzard individual rights to a boss who shoots out spikes as you move behind pillars, but there is a reason for it in WoW! In WoW you need to get a group of separate people to work in harmony, but in DA2 you’re just clicking around you just move your entire party out of the way, problem solved. Even standing in the effect in DA2 doesn’t really hurt you. Things are amazingly inconsistent though, and you’ll run into fights where standing in the wrong place will fucking kill you and where micromanaging your party out of effects is very difficult.

The major difference between DA1 and DA2 is encounter design. In DA1 and 2 you have normal enemies thrown at you with a higher rank enemy thrown in here or there. Ranking is an old MMORPG trope, where you have enemies who are normal, elite, or a boss. This system was implemented in DA1 as well but the pacing was done better. It might seem like a moot point but DA2 has sort of an extra rank below ‘normal’, they have really low hit point throw-away enemies. These weak rank enemies are scattered everywhere for absolutely no reason than to make the game feel more like it’s an Action-RPG. So basically you have to wade through superfluous enemies because the game is trying to fool you.

Story

My biggest issue is the plot, it’s really just a piece of shit with absolutely no direction, meaning, and it’s equally full of cheap sympathy ploys and embarrassing nerd politics. The NPCs barely interact with the plot and feel like they were simply inserted from another game. I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all reused in DA3. Maybe they just took whatever assets they had from the real Dragon Age sequel dumped in a throwaway story with a generic protagonist just to push something out?

The game starts out with you being run out of your home by the Darkspawn, The Darkspawn were the only interesting shit in the entire first game and immediately you’re whisked away from them to fight in some pointless conflict off in a boring fantasy version of French Algiers. You’re informed in cutscenes that you had a harrowing journey to Kirkwall and trying to find your rich uncle. After a little exposition you’re told the city is full, your uncle is poor, and you need to bribe people to get in. Instead of doing something interesting you have to pick two interchangeable illegal lines of work to make enough money to get into the city. You’re treated to another cutscene explaining you did whatever thing you picked for a year and poof you’re in the city. Bioware did an excellent job at skirting any kind of tension or interest that could be generated by being a homeless adventuring refugee trying to find your way in a strange city.

After that little prologue Bioware reveals the first story aspect they’re unhealthily obsessed with: the ‘Mage/Templar’ interplay. Essentially in Dragon Age the mages are policed by a religious group, and the Templars are the Mage Police. The mages need policed because mages basically they can get possess by a demon turning them into an abomination or make deals with demons to get super powers. If the mage is too weak, too dangerous, or the game wants to score sympathy the mage police make him tranquil, which basically is a magical lobomitzation: it turns them into retards and takes away their magic.

If you don’t play a mage your brother dies in the prologue so you get stuck with your mage sister, if you pick a mage your sister dies in the prologue. The motivation stays the same because the party needs a mage to properly railroad you. You learn about this awesome expedition to some dwarf ruins filled with monsters but they want you to invest 50 gold, but this would be a lot more poignant if it was 50 gold to buy some bricks cocaine.

Your entire goal in the first chapter is to get 50 gold rich and fuck bitches (like all poor people) and the motivation is to protect yourself/sister from the mage police. Though it’s not really demonstrated that you’re poor, basically you live in a dirty house and there is no real difference from the dirty house you start in and the palatial mansion you end up in. They really could have done good things with this plot point, but chose to ignore it in favor of letting you fuck a slutty pirate girl. Also the mage police are literally non-existent the entire game, you can go into their headquarters and cast as many spells as you want and no one will say shit. It’s hard to believe they’re a threat without something like in Baldur’s Gate 2 where they warp in to fine you for casting magic missile.

During this expedition you are betrayed after the leader finds an evil cursed relic, however everything works out fine and you accidentally stumble into a hoard of treasure. After you come home from your expedition your sister/brother ends up in the Mage Cult/Mage Police and there’s nothing you can do. If you take them on the expedition they get sick with Darkspawn Juice and either die or go off to join the Gray Wardens only if you have one specific NPC with you. There’s absolutely nothing you can do to keep the NPC, it’s a cheap sympathy ploy all around.

After you become New Money you suddenly become really important to the plot and have to deal with this game’s second unhealthy obsession the Qunari. There was one Qunari in DA1, he was in your party, he was boring as fuck, and that was the point. Now DA2 has a whole chapter of the fuckers. From the start of the game you’ve been told how the Qunari got stranded in the city and basically were given a part of the city for squatting menacingly. The main thing that bothered me is that it’s just a boatload of people and it’s never said they brought women with them. So it’s just a bunch of sailors who have been stranded in a city for years, how does this make a serious threat to the city? It’s like maybe 100 or 200 guys; just march a thousand soldiers in and slaughter them. If they changed that one thing they’d have their drama for the chapter and something for your oddly enlightened character to whine about. Instead they had to show how superior a perfect a warrior race that embraces eastern philosophy is.

So somewhere in the first chapter you learn that Qunari are the only race in the game that can make gunpowder, despite that they’re still a perfect sword wielding warrior race. Now in chapter 2 it turns out someone stole the recipe for that gun powder, but HOLD ON the Qunari are so fucking awesome and smart they knew the recipe was going to be stolen and put out a decoy recipe for a deadly nerve toxin; couldn’t they just have written “fag” on a piece of paper? Since the Qunari are such an awesome and flawless warrior race you can’t even complain about it, and basically everyone in the game just accepts this as a totally awesome way to reveal the evils of western society. So part of the city gets flooded with green poison and you confront the people who did it and they go on and on about how they’re angry with the Qunari and blah blah blah. How the fuck do you take a poison recipe and mistake it for a fucking explosives recipe anyway?

After that dumb quest there is another dumb quest where they are providing asylum to murderers, but it’s okay because it was elves whose sister got raped, so again the Qunari are perfect and blameless and everything is the fault of white people. Finally it’s revealed the one item needed to get them out of the city is the focus of your one of your NPC’s story thread. This is really annoying on two points, the relic is suddenly important and the Qunari are suddenly a big threat, when it’s insinuated that they just make the rich white people nervous previously. You’re really given no cue in the game that they realistically can just “take over” but they sure as shit do.

So, Isabella, your NPC, the slutty one, has been hunted because she lost this relic, and it’s also why the Qunari are in the city. Suddenly it’s a big deal and she’ll be killed without the relic even though it wasn’t a big deal at all up until the very point the game wanted to force a false choice. If you have enough friendship points with Isabella you can give him back the stupid relic, but not BEFORE HE attacks the city and beheads the leader, so regardless of what you do you get the same outcome. Then you have a chance to hand her over to be gang raped by a bunch of Muslims, give them the Koran and have to duel their leader anyway, or just murder them all in the palace. Absolutely nothing changes the outcome; you’re still the Hero of Kirkwall if you fight no one or fight everyone.

Now you’re the Hero of Kirkwall for killing (or not) a handful of angry foreigners who were too autistic to explain themselves. Everyone is very impressed by this display of pressing a single button for 15 minutes but unfortunately the king or whatever got killed by the Qunari and even if you COULD have prevented him from getting killed he would have stepped down because this game railroads you harder than John Henry. Now I guess while you’re living it up high as the Hero of Kirkwall the fucking Adolph Hitler of the mage world gets into power and subjugates and lobotomizes mages for three years, at this time you do nothing because you’re caught in a cutscene. It’s unclear what the magical properties of a cutscene are but it seems like a combination between D&D’s Time Stop and Heroin because time flies, shit happens, and you do not give a fuck.

Things come to a head and you go on a few stupid cheap sympathy quests to make you care about the plot. First you’re asked to go apprehend crazy mages to realize why lobotomy is good. Then you have to go quell an uprising for the understanding and coolheaded leader of the mage resistance. Either way, it’s obvious who the game wants you to side with. Somewhere in this chapter a mage murderer named Quentin who you have been tracking in previous chapters DECAPITATES YOUR MOTHER AND PUTS HER BODY ON HIS NECOMANTIC SEX DOLL. While necromantic real dolls are a hilarious idea, the whole thing is a dumb sympathy grab to again show you that some mages are bad and maybe you SHOULD lobotomize them all.

Now you’re told the Adolph Hitler and cool collected opposition leader randomly arguing in the street and you’re asked to diffuse the situation. As you’re speaking to them a mage from your party shows up and basically says this can’t go on any longer and blows up the fucking church and with it Dragon Age’s version of the pope. Now everyone is way more upset about the one person getting killed than anything else, so I don’t see why he didn’t just shoot her with a fireball but oooo it’s symbolic or whatever. I mean they could at least have had him crash a fucking dragon into twin spiral minarets as the game is so fucking heavy handed.

So now you either fight the mage police or fight the mages. Either way you fight both of the leaders because these writers fucking suck. If you pick the mage guy he randomly goes “Quentin’s research was too evil, too dangerous, so I put it aside. But now I see there was no other way. If Meredith(aka Hitler) expects blood magic? Then I will give it to her, Maker(aka God) help us all.” and turns himself into an abomination. Quentin is the guy who murdered your mother for a sex doll, so real fucking classy of him to bring that up. Further it’s not like you were being overwhelmed or anything, he just goes and does it to FORCE YOU to fight both bosses, because damnit they made this fight and you’re gonna do it! After that, you leave to fight Hitler and see she has a sword made out of the evil idol from the beginning of the game and it made her go crazy. So basically both leaders were two crazy people who were going to kill one another ANYWAY, it really didn’t matter what you did because no matter what side you took you get the same ending. You might as well not have been present because the end result is the mages rebel either because they were shown they can fight back by you or your mass slaughtering of them showed them how unjust the system was. Whatever, it was dumb as fuck.

Worm

I don’t know how else to explain that almost every single person on Caltrops hated Dragon Age 2, for completely different reasons. It wasn’t like it didn’t have support for the Mad Katz Throat Communicator and therefore opinion was split 50/50. Dragon Age 2 was brilliantly designed to offer something abominably unique to every single player, as if it were a fine selection of post-wedding hors d’oeuvre and you didn’t know enough people there to shame you into not stuffing as many of them down your face as possible.

Hating Dragon Age 2 is like trying to pick the best sweet in an European candy store. There’s this bit, where BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler says that what video games really need is a fast-forward button. There’s this bit, where LupoTheeButcher moderates a BioWare forum and can’t wait to give his own game a “10.” An applications engineer for BioWare did the same thing. They’re so proud of what they’ve put together here that they’re willing to throw any sense of etiquette out the door to mung aggregates. This means that absolutely no punches should be pulled on this insipid piece of garbage and it means that professional reviewers had a responsibility to be as strict as possible, if the people who made it are saying how perfect it is. What I’m talking about is, for professional reviewers, the nuclear option: the score 6.9/10.

None of them bothered to do it because they’re all whores. We’ll post reviews of people who played it in its entirety this week. HGLUAHGLUAHGLUA.

Yars’ Revenge by Atari
Yar’s Revenge by Atari Interactive

It isn’t until we read the game’s manual that we learn we are not controlling a fly, but rather a Yar scout. The Qotile (aka “the guy hiding behind the red shield”) can only destroyed by a blast from the Zorlon Cannon, which the Yar must arm by using TRONS (units of energy). TRONS can be obtained by nibbling on cells from the Qotile’s shield, or touching the Qotile when he is not swirling. Yar can hide from the Qotile’s Destroyer Missile in the Neutral Zone (the “colorful and glittering path down the center of the playfield”), but cannot fire from inside it.

In addition to the manual, Atari also included a mini-Yars’ Revenge comic book that further detailed the Yars’ plight. According to the comic book, the titular “revenge” was in response to the destruction of the Yars home planet of Razak IV. We also learn that Yars are alien descendants of common house flies who wear chrome armor into battle. And if you didn’t get enough back story from the comic book, Atari also released two separate vinyl records containing dramatic reenactments of the Yars story. Atari used to put a lot of effort into their releases back then, yo. In this case the efforts paid off, as Yars’ Revenge became Atari’s best selling original title for the 2600.

Yars’ Revenge has seen multiple ports, mostly to portable consoles. The game was released for the Game Boy Color in 1999, as part of a compilation package for the Game Boy Advance in 2005, and Atari’s Greatest Hits Volume 2 for the Nintendo DS in 2011. Yars’ Revenge was also included on both the Atari Flashback 2 and Jakks Pacific’s Atari Joystick Plug-n-Play/TV Games controllers. Most recently, the original version appeared most recently on the Atari Classics compilation for the PSP and iOS. (Just to clarify, all previous versions of Yars’ Revenge have been ports of the original, 1981 version.)

That brings us to Yar’s Revenge, a brand new Atari game developed by Killspace Entertainment. You can tell it’s an all new game because the old one was Yars’ (with a trailing apostrophe) and the new one is Yar’s (with the apostrophe before the “s”). SEE WHAT THEY DID THERE? This sly bit of coy marketing probably would have worked better if people hadn’t been misspelling the original version as “Yar’s” for the past three decades. Exactly thirty years after the release of the original, Yar’s Revenge hit PCs and XBLA in late April and PSN whenever hackers finally got gone done pissing all over it.

Despite the name of the original, apparently the Yars never got their revenge. In fact, in the sequel we learn that the Yars were all but wiped out by the Qotile, and what few Yars weren’t killed were captured. That’s where you come in, of course. After escaping, you’ll be exacting revenge against your former captors with guns a’blazing, which (technically speaking) means the game’s title should probably have been “Yar’s Yars’ Revenge Revenge”. Fortunately for us all it’s not; apparently, revenge is a dish best served one Yar at a time.

Speaking of names, this all new Yar’s Revenge doesn’t much resemble its namesake. The new Yar’s Revenge is at heart an on-rails shooter. Players are automatically guided through a beautifully pre-rendered world, and are allowed to move (but not steer) using the left analog stick while aiming with the right. In the past thirty years, Yar weaponry has come a long way; along with your traditional pulse laser, you also have a railgun and missiles at your disposal. Like all shooters, there are trade-offs (missiles are limited and the rail gun needs to recharge). Along the way you will also encounter power ups that can do things like recharge your health or make you temporarily invulnerable.

As with nearly all video games, the overall goal here is to rack up a high score. Your score can be boosted by acquiring and maintaining multipliers, which themselves can be increased by shooting accuracy and speed. Yar’s Revenge contains six levels, each of which ends with a boss fight (where those powered-up weapons will come in handy).

One thing the sequel shares with the original is in-game poor story telling. In the original, the Yars’ back story had to be conveyed through the help of a comic book (the Atari 2600 wasn’t particularly known for its ability to render cut scenes). In the sequel, the ongoing Yar saga is related to players through voiceless, subtitled cut scenes. I hope you can read fast, because the words tend to zoom by faster than a Qotile Destroyer Missile. Even worse is the written dialogue that appears in-game, usually while a wave of enemies is firing lasers at your insect-shaped head. If you have a tough time texting and driving, you can forget about following the plot.

As far as shooters go, Yar’s Revenge isn’t great and it isn’t terrible; it’s just kind of there. While some of the bosses and waves of opponents can be tough to dispose of (depending on the difficulty settings you’ve chosen), more than anything, the repeated zapping of continual onslaughts of baddies grows monotonous long before players can blast their way through the game’s two-to-three hour playtime. More important to me than the fate of Yar was finding out when this punishment was going to end.

Thirty years ago, Atari programmer Howard Scott Warshaw created the Yars’ Revenge, a 192×160 resolution game that consists of 4k of code and is still being played today on modern systems. Thirty years later we have Yar’s Revenge, an absolutely gorgeous on-rails shooter that is bigger in size than a conventional CD (the PC version is well over 700 meg) and will be forgotten by most gamers in 30 days, much less 30 years. If that doesn’t sum up the current state of the gaming industry, I don’t know what does.

Flack

5. Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions

My only previous experience with Griptonite Games being the excellent Web of Shadows DS, and the fun but short Assassin’s Creed 2 DS, I was fully expecting this game to kick all kinds of ass. Alas, while this game sounds like a total improvement on paper, in practice it’s a complete failure.

Shattered Dimensions replaces WOS’ mobs of blobby 2-3 move enemies with small groups of enemies that have higher quality models and a crapload of moves. Sounds great, but it doesn’t matter that the enemy has a whole swiss army knife of moves when you’ve got him stunlocked and there’s barely anyone else on the screen to worry about. To up the Metroid flavor, special moves are no longer bought with combat experience orbs, but gathered in hidden containers, giving even less reason to fight the baddies. Finally, the game’s achievements are unlocked by speed-running it under various conditions and you happen to be playing a character with the agility of Spider Man. Guess what all these elements turn the game into? A brawler where you’re doing nothing but avoiding fights.

And why is it Web of Shadows, which primarily took place in the sewers and subway, had these enormous environments where you could leap and web swing through the air while Shattered Dimension’s Manhattan skyline level doesn’t even let you get above the 2nd floor? Plus the boss fights suck. They really suck.

4. Infinite Space

I came expecting Space Opera, I got incest hentai instead.

The one good part of the game is the Tetris minigame where you fit components into your hull squares visually, rather than limiting things with abstract tonnage numbers. Unfortunately, this game turns out to be an even worse tease than Galactic Civilizations 2 because fleet combat is literally one-dimensional. Your starfleet acts as a single unit with aggregate stats. You move toward the enemy, let off a volley once they’re in range, then run out of their range while your weapons recharge. Rinse and repeat. The game tries to mix things up by adding a basic rock-paper-scissors system of attack styles, but the AI only picks Rock or Scissors. The initially steep learning curve is the fault of the game’s shitty HUD. The controls are touchscreen-only, but all you’re doing is pushing buttons, at max about 8 of them. The worst of both worlds!

So the gameplay is crap, what about the plot? It actively punishes you for advancing it. The motivation of first boss, the dictator of your homeworld who forbids space travel because he’s too old for it and jealous of the youngsters (not intended to be a joke), is Infinite Space at its least painful. At all times it is made clear that pirates are the dominant military force in the galaxy and the one thing they’re busy doing is rape. Pirate bases are filled with sex slaves. A waitress you’re trying to recruit into your crew is kidnapped, raped, and then gets a bomb surgically implanted in her to try and kill you. Even the Bishonen in your crew nearly gets raped by pirates who mistake him for a girl at first, then decide he’s close enough.

The main character is being monitored by aliens from afar and one of the first things they do is implant the memory into his brain that the girl they’re using as their spy is his beloved sister. So he takes her into his crew and all sorts of creepiness ensues because the main character’s “sister” REALLY makes it clear she wants to jump his bones. Worse, the rest of the crew is catches on and starts saying things like, “You two sure act more like boyfriend and girlfriend than brother and sister, are you sure you’re related? Because, I mean, if you’re not really related it doesn’t count!” while the main character is all, “No that’s gross, dudes, she’s my sister!” It was right around this point that I quit the game.

Star Fox Command, aka. “Help the furries find true love” is less creepy and a better Space Opera than Infinite Space.

3. Zelda: Spirit Tracks

Fuck me! I bought a DS to DISTRACT me from my commute! This miserable flash game is all about taking long trips, staring at empty scenery, honking at animals who wander in your way, and avoiding being hit by asshole road hogs. I haven’t really played a Zelda Game since Ocarina of time but what the hell? An expansive overworld where every tile could hide treasures or dangers wasn’t good enough for you? It was that fucking rumblepack fishing minigame, wasn’t it? You had to go and turn Zelda into a cavalcade of bullshit minigames after that, didn’t you?

There IS eventually some traditional Zelda dungeon crawling, and how can you fuck that up? Oh, I know! Make it so the very first weapon you find is not activated by a button, or even a stylus motion, but by BLOWING INTO THE MICROPHONE! “This is the Captain speaking. Folks I want to let you know you can get a great view right now of the biggest dork in the world. He’s sitting in seat 27C and doing Lamaze exercises into a video game device. We have turned off the fasten seatbelts sign so you may properly stand up, point, and laugh.”

I traded in this turd faster than Little Red Riding Hood’s Zombie BBQ.

2. Viewtiful Joe: Double Trouble

HUGE disappointment, especially since this game is a very close 2nd to Ninja Gaiden for best looking game on the DS. Unlike Ninja Gaiden, this is a perfect example of how NOT to do stylus controls in an action game. Before you even start playing, there’s this thing during the opening cut scenes where every 5 sentences the scene comes to a halt and you have to drag a photo slide (?) up the touchscreen to advance the scene. And if you get impatient and just make an upward flick, the slide will only go up as far as your stylus went, then slide back down into place. You are not half-assing your way through our bullshit busywork QTE, young man! Now drag that slide all the way from the bottom to the top and advance this cut scene like you mean it!

That’s just how picky the touchscreen controls are to activate your powers in real time, while pressing buttons, in the middle of an action packed fight, your Vfx power bar draining the whole time. What a miserable clusterfuck of a game and a terrible swansong for the makers of God Hand.

1. Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift

A deliberate attempt to destroy everything that was good about the original Final Fantasy Tactics, or the well meaning but completely misguided attempts by a high-functioning autistic to improve the game?

I mean, if you want to add demihumans to FF:T, I guess Moogles and Playboy bunnies are easier to differentiate at the DS’ resolution than halflings and elves, but who would want to play a pack of furries? I guess adding one-arm-behind-your-back “laws” you must follow is a way to increase the challenge, but the player is going to be more annoyed by them than anything. I suppose a plot that can be summed up as “we’re playing a MMORPG, join our guild before the giant chicken eats you!” gives an excuse for plentiful battles and encounters, but it doesn’t exactly make for a compelling narrative. Yeah, taking away the ability to custom choose your characters with the job system and instead drip-feeding new skills through random item drops… no wait, that just plain sucks any way you shake it.

Was this a GBA game that got delayed for the DS? Why are the battlefields static drawings? What happened to scaling castle walls to lower the drawbridge and let your party inside? What happened to battles raging across multiple levels and fully rotatable maps? Where’s my magic miniatures map?

I think I can say nothing more damning about this game than the only nice thing I can think of to say about it. It’s refreshingly colorful, compared to the majority of my top 10 games.

Too bad the original Final Fantasy Tactics was only released on non-portable platforms like the PSP, it could have been the ultimate travel game.

Mischief Maker

#10 Bangai O Spirits

A Free-roaming version of Every Extend with a Giant Robot theme and an obsession with kicking your DS’ graphics processor in the balls. Other Websites have been a teensy bit overenthusiastic by saying Bangai-O renders all other videogames obsolete forever, but it is a blast to play. Just bear in mind that you must speed run the levels, plowing past the regular enemies toward the mission target, and bombing whenever you’re cornered by missile swarms. Slowly and meticulously picking off every obstacle ruins the game. Fun in small bursts, it’s the DS’s replacement for Wario Ware ever since they gave up and released Wario Ware: Fuck it, make your own goddamn games!

#9 Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars

As always for the GTA series, an amazing technical accomplishment, rendering this gigantic city in 3D on the fly with no pauses for loading areas. The drug dealing Elite mechanic is an incredibly fun new way to avoid the awful campaign missions in a GTA game. I can’t believe that it’s the 7th or 8th title in the series and it’s only now that they got the idea to incorporate Dope Wars into their open world crime-spree games, (especially that it didn’t occur to them until after they got the idea to incorporate Animal Crossing into GTA 4!)

People who complain about getting wanted stars from offscreen cops and toll booths are idiots. Sedate uneventful commutes delivering goods from Dealer A to Dealer B are not what make for a fun game. High speed chases with the police while all your money is tied up in a satchel full of heroin, then crashing cop cars to erase the wanted stars are. The main strike against the game is that, as always for the GTA series, the controls are an awkward and frustrating mess, especially once you throw a stylus into the mix.

Great as it is, I’m not surprised this game bombed. It’s a GTA game you play in public! The first time I started it up, I noticed a woman looking over my shoulder right as the screen had a huge image of a girl lying on the ground with blood streaming out of her mouth and nose and the subtitle, “Ling! What the fuck?!!” Oh yeah, GTA:CW was designated to Hotel room duty only after that.

#8 Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword

Using the old Resident Evil trick of 3D characters on a pre-rendered background, this is hands down the best looking game on the DS. The touch-screen controls are incredibly simple, fast, responsive and a hell of a lot of fun. It’s not a real deep combat system, but there’s a certain visceral satisfaction to actually tracing the slashes across the bad guys. Considering all the DS games that look like they could have easily been released on the SNES, it’s refreshing to have a title that shows off how this handheld is indeed more powerful than a PSX.

My only real complaints about the game are the strange ways Team Ninja tried to gear it to the DS’ intended child audience, like forcing Ryu to hang out with a bunch of irritating ninja kids between levels, removing all traces of gore, or only using a hideously deformed demon woman with half a face as the game’s sex object.

#7 Tony Hawk’s Proving Ground

I hear people all the time say that Mario 64 (and the DS port) is this ageless classic that’s still fun today. Seriously? Because THPG is a superior 3rd person platformer in every way. It has bigger environments chock full of secrets to discover and minigames to play, a selection of protagonists way more acrobatic than Mario or Luigi ever were, and a lack of Mario 64’s archaic camera system that was a greater threat to your survival in that game than the enemies themselves.

The only strike against THPG verses Mario 64 is that THPG has a serious case of the Brown ‘N Greys. Thanks for rendering the filthy decaying cityscape that most real life skateboarders use to train so realistically, guys. It’s not like I’m playing your game for escapism or anything..

#6 Advanced Wars: Days of Ruin

The best DS title in Nintendo’s premiere portable strategy series, but it tried its damndest to make you hate it.

From a pure gameplay standpoint this is the most balanced AW has ever been. The simple experience system for units discourages using attrition tactics. Loading COs onto specific units creates a nice “King” unit to mix up attack priorities and give you an option for disrupting the enemy’s HUGE! HUGE! HUGE! super power meter.

But Christ on a pogo stick, why did they have to take AW’s bright, cheerful visuals and silly story and turn it into a SERIOUS LESSON presented in brown-o-vision? Was there some kind of public outcry that impressionable teens would turn to video games for moral guidance and start a world war because AW made it look like good clean fun? Sorry, video game developers, but when you write a character whose sole personality trait is that he tells bad jokes at incredibly inappropriate times like he’s got some irritating strain of Tourettes, Tolstoy you ain’t.

#5 Spider Man: Web of Shadows

I’ve sung the praises of this game in greater detail before. A DS game that not only captures the gameplay of Devil May Cry 3 in a way that no other imitator succeeded in, it actually improves the combat in several respects. Plus with half the environments covered in Giger-esque alien goo, it feels more like a proper Metroid game than the two official DS Metroid titles ever did.

#4 Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume

This is the game I THOUGHT Disgaea was going to be based on the box blurb. This is the game I was PROMISED Rondo of Swords was going to be by a certain nutjob. It’s a definite love-it-or-hate-it title based on the wildly varying review scores, but for me it’s the best SRPG on the DS.

The big thing this game does is admit that SRPGs are less a battle of wits against a cunning opponent and more a game of bait-and-pile against simpleminded AI drones. Each battle your antiheroes are outnumbered and must not only defeat the larger enemy force, but surround each individual in formation and so completely overpower them that the finishing blow sends their HP deep into negative number territory, netting you “sin” points. There’s a minimum score you need to reach per battle, and exceeding that minimum gets you a huge bounty of free items, including permanent stat-boosting ones.

The other big wrinkle in this game is that when a character attacks an enemy, all the other characters in range attack as well (and can attack multiple times per round this way). The flip side is that your enemies do the same thing, and bad character placement can get half your team wiped out in a single round. Throw in a lack of random encounters for XP grinding and this is the most challenging and unforgiving SRPG I’ve ever played. It’s also nice that the game has rotatable textured 3D arenas that look better than the original Final Fantasy Tactics, unlike a certain game I’ll get to later.

Unfortunately the game is made by Square Enix who specialize in games that can be finished by people in persistent vegetative states, so they added a panic button. Using the magic power of the game’s Mac Guffin, you can max out the stats for one of your teammates and breeze through a battle, at the price of that teammate permanently dying after the battle ends and pushing you ever closer to the bad ending. You can use a maximum of 4 characters per battle and you get at least 1 new one every chapter. If you can’t resist using this item, this game may not be for you.

Finally, this game is even funnier than Disgaea. It’s supposed to be all dark and tragic, but it’s written by Square Enix and the result is the funniest shit since The Happening! “No, Ersatz-Satan! Don’t make me kill the odious comic relief character and send his soul screaming into the depths of hell!”

3. Metal Slug 7

I can’t speak for how this game ranks in the entire Metal Slug Series, but it kicks the shit out of Contra 4! It’s a glorious run-n-gun platform ballet of explosions. A huge selection of weapons, gigantic and beautifully animated bosses, attacks and hazards you can see coming, secrets strewn everywhere, a level where you pilot a 2-story tall battlemech, and… a dating sim?

2. Civilization Revolution

I don’t care that the graphics are ass, the sound is almost non-existent, and the AI is a cheating bitch, because the distracting power of this game will DEVOUR a long plane flight. It’s like a speed chess version of Civilization with a smaller map and all the fat trimmed from the unit list and technology tree, but all the insanely absorbing megalomania intact. Just be careful you don’t get too drawn in, it’s very awkward to have a stewardess telling you, “sir, the plane has landed, you have to leave,” only for you to snap back, “No! Not until my Jihad is complete!”

1. Knights in the Nightmare

Another game I’ve lavished praise on before. What more can I say? Every other great game on this system can best be summed up with, “It’s _____, only portable!” In an entertainment medium where 90% of the content is based on Aliens, KitN’s plot is based on King Lear fer chrissakes! More creative and genre-bending than a bucketfull of Mirror’s Edges, in my opinion it’s the best game on the DS.

Mischief Maker

Editors’s note: Be here Wednesday for the 5 most disappointing Nintendo DS games!

The Lost Islands of Alabaz by Michael Gentry

Michael Gentry would seem like a good bet to produce one: as author of the modern classic Anchorhead he has the most impressive record of this years’ Spring Thing entrants, and he’s trod this territory before with Jack Toresal and the Secret Letter. Like most authors of childrens’ IF, he seems to have written The Lost Islands of Alabaz primarily for his own children; to an adult audience it’s likely to be a mixed bag, however, and it has problems that would be frustrating for any age.

The basic premise is that the archipelago kingdom of Alabaz is under a curse, shrouding the ocean in perpetual mist and rendering navigation impossible. Impossible, that is, without the Ten Shinies of Area-Unlocking, which — an innovation scarcely credible, I know — are scattered across the islands themselves. The king of Alabazopolis gives you the first shiny and you sail off into the mists to collect the gems and trigger eucatastrophe. The astute will have noticed that something’s missing from this picture: genre demands that the shinies were scattered by the Evil Guys, who are now trying to collect them before you. Not so; Alabaz has a number of antagonists, but all turn out to be relatively benign. Alabaz hints at threats, but really is a very safe world.

The game comes with a feelie .pdf that goes a long way to help establish setting, and some of the island locations are quite strong: the flooded lighthouse of Lugubria, the junkpile island, the clarinet landslide. And there are a good number of cool set-pieces. But there’s little feeling of overarching unity, which makes your quest — reunifying the islands under the Alabazopolis monarchs — seem a bit questionable. Why do these very different places need to be brought back under the rule of this rather uninspiring king? There’s plenty of evidence of thinning, but most of this is linked to a never-resolved mystery that has only a vague relation to the main plot.

Alabaz is a blend of old structure and new gloss, and presumably the idea is to introduce children to old-school IF by smoothing off all the sharp edges. The worldbuilding is conspicuously Zorkian, with perhaps a touch of Oz and Myst; the puzzle structure, too, is a low-detail, big-map, collect-the-treasures quest. In classic CYOA style, you’re encouraged to think of the PC as literally being yourself. On the other hand, there is a very modern casual-game feel: the tutorial virtually has sparkles coming off it, making progress is generally quite easy, achievements are showered down upon you and every miscommand is painstakingly explained. (I would expect an eight-year-old to grasp IF conventions a great deal faster, with less help, than a novice of thirty; but this is from the perspective of someone who did learn those conventions through atrociously bad 80s IF, which may not represent everyone.)

Much of the tutorial / help sparkles are delivered through a companion NPC:

It’s your best friend, Trig.

Yeah, we mostly hang out at my place because his mother’s kind of scary.

From the very outset, Trig functions as a sort of desktop adventure assistant, offering frequent instructions on the interface and contextual hints. Trig’s intended role is to be your inseparable companion, and there are other moves in the direction of adventure-party; your ship contains a couple more children who are helpful for the occasional puzzle, though they don’t really do enough to develop into major characters. But Trig’s assistant role is sort of misjudged; he overexplains things with a level of cheery precision that would, if delivered by one actual child to another, result in blows. On the other hand (presumably so that you don’t feel that he’s the one actually in charge) he’s a physical coward, generally abandoning you just as things get most perilous. Other than this, you don’t seem to have that much of a relationship with Trig; apart from one puzzle that requires cooperation, there isn’t a sense of doing things together. I managed to tune him out to some extent, but the experience was a lot like being followed around by a tone-deaf know-it-all rather than a sense of having a friend. I’d have parked him permanently on the ship, but that seemed out-of-character; and besides, I did need a hint system some of the time.

I’m not sure if there are uniform rules for how well children’s fiction translates to an adult audience, but one major factor: stories that don’t feel that, because they’re for children, they must therefore be simple. Diana Wynne Jones, quoted in a recent eulogy by Neil Gaiman: “Children are much more careful readers than adults. You don’t have to repeat everything for children. You do with adults, because they aren’t paying full attention.” In terms of complexity, Alabaz is not small: it extends across ten islands, has a midgame involving a lot of back-and-forth, and relies upon traditional adventure-game puzzles. But it is definitely pared-down, focused on the functional elements more than atmosphere, emotional range, or plot. It feels gentle to a fault; there’s a certain amount of melancholia, given that we’re healing an wounded kingdom for an ineffectual Fisher-King type, but it’s quite low-key. There are no glimpses into the alien world of adulthood; adults have the same concerns as children. Tone is huge: a common failing in kid-lit is a sense of forced enthusiasm, often twinned with a clean-cut lack of transgression. Alabaz occasionally feels this way: it labours under a surfeit of exclamation marks. (Trig in particular needs to lay off the sugar.)

The classic children’s-fantasy-adventure arc starts out with the children doing things without adults, or despite them. Hiding in a wardrobe, going down the wrong chimney or through a door that’s not meant to open, sneaking into Retiring Rooms or over garden walls, or just waking up late at night. If children are going to drive the plot, there needs to be a reason why adults aren’t doing so. Adults can be hostile, incompetent, absent, oblivious or constrained; if they’re not, and they cheerfully allow the most important parts of the story to be driven by children, things feel suspicious. (Why aren’t you getting in the transcombobulator, Scientist Uncle? And why does the King send a crew of children on his kingdom-uniting quest?) The PC here never transgresses; rather, your default interaction with an adult involves getting them to do the right thing, usually just by demanding that they do it. As it turns out, the adults of Alabaz are mostly just hopeless and trivial, too focused on their own petty concerns to either assist or obstruct you very effectively. You might read this as some sort of satire — on the deferral of environmental damage or national debt to future generations because this one is too venal and ineffective, perhaps — but mostly it seems to be an accident, an unintened consequence of the story’s construction.

And there just isn’t very much danger. This is nowhere near the Roald Dahl method, where it turns out that there are monsters under the bed and they’re far more horrible than you ever imagined, but can nonetheless be defeated; rather, it turns out that when you get closer the monsters are just normal people who are a little bit misguided and need to be set straight. Whether this is a better thing to to teach children I have no idea, but it certainly doesn’t make for a very satisfying narrative. It becomes hard to take the PC’s heroic-knight role very seriously when the dragons are all paper tigers, or the heroic-explorer trope when navigation is magically guaranteed. Together with the ineffectual adults, this produces some moments that feel quite out-of-place: at one point you have to steal the egg of a fantastic bird, which is a fine old adventurey trope. The problem is that the bird doesn’t come across as a fearsome beast, and the reason you’re getting the egg is to persuade a listless noble to rejoin the kingdom. He doesn’t have much of a reason either to raise baby birds or to resist union; they’re just passing whims. So the episode comes across interfering with a wild animal to gratify an upper-class twit, which is a shame, because mechanically it’s one of the game’s neater puzzles.

It’s not bug-free. From the outset, the journal displayed a goal that I had never encountered (fix the racing gondola). When I actually reached the racing gondola, it turned out that the gondola race displays a few other bits of weird behaviour. For a game this size it’s mostly pretty damn robust, but since it’s pitched at novices the bar is rather higher. The puzzles are all fair, well-clued and straightforward; the main design problem is that they’re heavily designed to require a lot of back-and-forth travel between islands, which is a bit awkward when movement is variously constrained by devices and mazes — often for no good reason except to make you trudge back and forth. At worst, a trip from A’ to B’ involves walking through Island A, boarding your ship, going to the helm, setting a course to Island C, raising the anchor, leaving the ship, going to the furthest point of Island C to flip a switch that reactivates a travel-device on Island B, returning to the ship and the helm, setting a course for Island B, raising the anchor, leaving the ship, using a travel-device, and then walking to B’. This would be less of a problem if you only had to do it once, but Alabaz is the sort of game where you get an idea and toddle off to try it out and then get stuck and poke at every location in sequence. I suspect it would be worse if you weren’t familiar with adventure-game conventions.

The travel system doesn’t make an immense amount of sense as narrative pacing, either; I know that the ship’s really just a big nautical linking-book, but the adventures-at-sea thing is sort of scuppered if the ship functions as an infallible teleportation device. I get the impression that a core design goal was to produce something that wouldn’t be playable in a single session, that you’d come back to on successive evenings and mull over in the meantime; and it certainly has this effect, but this is largely because there’s so much will-sapping travel. Which is odd, because in a lot of respects it’s very stripped-down and efficient: short paragraphs, little in the way of extraneous scenery, tight puzzle focus. Nonetheless, we have here a story that’s basically about a fantastic journey, and the travel is the most tedious part.

That said, my guess is that this would be a pretty good game with which to introduce a child to IF; the puzzles are responsive, . It doesn’t translate too well to adult reading — there’s too much Spielbergian, Saturday-morning innocence and not enough darkness, and the world isn’t quite detailed or expansive enough to produce the cornucopia feeling that makes fantasy tick. It’s not the Great Children’s IF, but this is not exactly a damning indictment; and writing excellent fiction for children is probably trickier than doing so for adults.

One of the things that Alabaz made me realise: in book form, it’s very easy to judge the approximate target age for children’s fiction, but this is mostly a matter of visual cues. The style of cover art, size and style of the typeface, how much illustration there is and so on send quite clear signals. Clearly IF is never going to be all that suitable for children who aren’t ready for books without illustrations, but other than that I had trouble catching cues early on. But the safety of the world, its lack of any serious villains or monstrous monsters, suggests that it’s intended for children who are quite small — possibly too small to read this without adult help. But if they have adult help, why do they need Trig? As neither a parent nor an educator, I’m necessarily making guesses here, but at a minimum I’d expect the gap between being able to read independently and being interested in more emotionally toothy stories is quite a narrow one. I suspect that children’s literature is best written not by a doting parent — someone who primarily wants a safe, clean, improving world for their children — but a crazy uncle.

(Yeah, I know, you can probably reel off a dozen counterexamples. Nonetheless.)

maga

Editors’s note: The Lost Islands of Alabaz can be downloaded, for free, here. It will work for Windows, Linux and the Mac. You’ll need an interpreter, but that link also tells you where to get that.

Those of us with fond memories of the Atari 2600 have multiple ways to keep enjoying those blocky classics. A few die hard dorks (myself included) still own real Atari consoles; those less dedicated (or dorky) can still enjoy the games through emulation on virtually any modern computer. Compilations of Atari 2600 games have also been released for essentially every video game console released in the past 15 years. The latest of these retro compilations is Atari’s Greatest Hits for the iPad.

Technically Atari’s Greatest Hits is available for free via an iTunes download, but the free version only comes with Pong — which, unless you rode/ride the short bus each morning, you’ll tire of in just a few minutes. After downloading the core program, an additional hundred games are available for purchase, divided into groups of four for 99 cents each. For hardcore old school gamers, the entire lot can be purchased for a one time $15 fee. While each game grouping technically has a “theme”, some of the pack groupings make little sense; if you buy the Missile Command Pack (which comes with both the arcade and the Atari 2600 versions of the game), you’ll also be the proud owner of a prime example of false advertising, “Fun With Numbers”.

Of the 100 available games, 18 are arcade games and 82 are ports of Atari 2600 games. Most of the four-title game packs contains a sampling from each group. The Asteroids pack, for example, contains the arcade versions of Asteroids and Asteroids Deluxe along with the Atari 2600 versions of Asteroids and Canyon Bomber. The Centipede pack contains both the arcade and Atari 2600 ports of Centipede and Millipede. The only games available to purchase are official Atari titles, so you’ll find no Activision or Imagic games here, boy. A small subset of the games support multiplayer gaming over Bluetooth. While this feature makes sense in head-to-head games like Warlords and Combat, going through the hassle of talking one of your friends into also buying this compilation and configuring Bluetooth just to take turns watching each other play Yars’ Revenge and Tempest seems somewhat pointless.

Each digital game purchased contains scans of the owner’s manual, box cover, and in the case of the arcade games, original artwork. None of them are a replacement for holding or touching the real thing, but when you’re paying for digital content (especially when we’re talking about 30-35 year old games), more content is better. As for the quality of the games themselves, the conversions are passable. The games look and sound relatively authentic, although nitpickers will spot slight differences here and there.

The obvious elephant in the room is, “How well do the controls translate to a touch screen interface?”, with the answer being a resounding, “Meh”. Listen, moving my finger around on top of a picture of a joystick will never feel realistic. The controls on the iPad are spaced so far apart that it’s almost impossible to hold the iPad up and play the games at the same time. Playing on a smaller screen makes the device easier to hold, but shrinks the virtual controls at the same time. From Crystal Castle’s trackball to Tempest’s spinner (replaced with a “sliding dial”), the lack of tactile feedback is both noticed and missed (don’t get me started on Battlezone or Major Havok). Atari’s Greatest Hits is compatible with the about-to-be-released iCade, a device that turns your iPad into a mini arcade cabinet (complete with a Bluetooth joystick). With an MSRP of $99 there are far cheaper ways to enjoy old Atari games, but if you already planned on picking up the iCade, your Atari’s Greatest Hits experience no doubt would be improved.

For mobile gamers, compilations of Atari games already exist for Sony’s PSP and the Nintendo DS. And, as previously mentioned, both Atari 2600 emulators and MAME have been ported to nearly every platform under the sun by now (there’s even a port of MAME for the iPhone). If you’re an iPad owner and you either enjoy touch-screen controls or enjoy being frustrated by them, you could do worse than picking up “Atari’s Greatest Hits” for the iPad.

Flack

00s- The Terminator franchise follows in the steps of Superman’s second and third sequels while Jame’s Cameron’s Avatar becomes the most successful blockbuster ever.

What happened?

The first Terminator movie was made with $50 so they couldn’t afford to waste your time. The Terminator arrives in the opening scene and they get right to killing Bill Paxton in the most painful manner possible.

The sequel opens up with the war in the future. While not the grim guerrilla struggle of a people “this close to being snuffed out forever”, was fairly exciting.

It was disappointing that the third movie was basically a in-joke retread, but at least the goal was to just have fun.

So the time came to make the next Terminator movie. Finally they were ditching the time travel retreading and going with the machine war. Even a fantastic franchise like Back to the Future barely survived a time travel plot rehash; Doc Brown almost killed the entire thing with a piece of chalk and required drawn out diagram if anyone wanted a hope of following the plot.
So, when this time came some people were gathered around. These people included siamese writer twins John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris, whose only previous credits include a bunch of shit, one episode of Married with Children, one episode of Aeon Flux, Sandra Bullock’s The Net, fucking Catwoman, and having Arnold Schwarzenegger repeat lines from previous movies in T3 (and would eventually go on to pen the wildly successful Surrogates with Bruce Willis). The next good sign was that it was to be directed by self-assigned nickname “McG” whose only previous directing credits were the two Charlie’s Angels movies.

When the time came and these people were gathered around a table, the question was asked “What should our new Terminator movie be about?”

The eventual best answer that would then go on to be greenlit was “A 20th century death row inmate kisses a cancer lady then tries to find redemption when he’s reborn as a terminator with a heart”

Even Ernest Hemingway admitted that everyone’s first draft is shit. When the time came for rewrites, someone took a red pen and wrote “Salvation” over “redemption”, the word “literally” right after “heart”, and finally a bunch of underlines and circles around “literally” alongside a doodle of the Grinch.

With all big productions, there’s bound to be some miscomminucation. In T:S’s case, it was between the guy who thought the machines were everywhere hunting humans down, and the guy who thought he was making Black Hawk Down 2. The first guy had resistance command on a mobile submarine and scenes showing how loud sounds and fire immediately drew the attention of machines. The second guy unknowingly slipped in scenes of everyone walking around wide open airbases and soldiers starting bonfires out in the open at night back to back with scenes showing how fires immediately attract the attention of machines. The first guy got a memo that John was the central key figure in the resistance and that any retro time paradox that erases his existence will doom mankind. The second guy got a conflicting memo that John was just a grunt who didn’t even get his own squad. Second guy figures it’s early in the war so people have to carry around useless guns instead of lasers. The first guy gives the machines giant mechs, water snake robots, and motorcycle robots (that fly out of Devastator’s legs!) in a world where all the road crews have been vaporized.

Now, it’s impossible to read a lot of scenes on paper and know how they’ll play out on screen, but there are some things that once you read them, you immediately realize something went wrong. For example, if at any point in the making of the movie adaptation of Wanted, you find yourself writing “and then the peanut butter rats explode”, you should probably start over.

FADE IN

INT. PRISON CELL – DAY

19 years since the last “real” Terminator movie. A man awaits execution. He offers to sell his body to science in exchange for a kiss from a terminal cancer patient. The deal is done.

 

MAN

So that’s what death tastes like.

The scene continues. This should probably go on for at least 5 more minutes.

A CLAW bursts through the roof and REACHES towards them! The 60 foot tall robot king kong has snuck up on them!

and then the water snake robots jump up and attack the helicopter

John Connor aborts nuking the monsters’ base to go in and rescue a prisoner. He holds a tracker to guide him to the hostage. Wasn’t this the ending to Aliens? Let’s give John’s tracker the exact same sound effect. Did we add in a dirty mute orphan girl? No? Let’s do that. Oh, and the too slow service elevator escape followed by the bad guy arriving in it. This movie includes the character Kyle Reese, who was once played by Michael Biehn, who was also in Aliens. It all makes sense!

INT. RESISTANCE BASE – NIGHT

Wounded, but alive from the magnetic mine, they RIP open Marcus’ shirt.

 

NOT CLAIRE DANES
Holy shit! Something shocking!

With a metallic CLANK, beefy black guy slams his RIFLE BUTT into Marcus “skull” (tee hee) to knock out this “man” (*giggle*). I know we’ve done a pretty good job of Marcus being a Terminator coming as a total shock to the audience, but maybe throw in a “NOT a terminator” sign, just to be safe.

EXT. SKYNET CENTRAL – FINAL ASSAULT

The lone transport helicopter lands and totally kicks their fucking ass!

INT. SKYNET PRODUCTION PLANT – FINAL ASSAULT

The terminator RISES from the MOLTEN metal! John quickly takes aim at yet another conveniently placed LN2 source.

 

JOHN
You and me? We’re finished professionally.

Fucking BLAM!

FABIO

>touch tits
HONK,HONK!

Mentula Macanus: Apocolocyntosis by One of the Bruces and Drunken Bastard

It was so extraordinarily bad that, shortly after, someone or other did a MST3K satire of the game, ensuring Stiffy’s status as a running gag. A few years later, in 2001, Adam Thornton released Stiffy Makane: The Undiscovered Country. Entered into the IF Comp, this took the basic attitude of gross-out sex humour and used it to snark at AIF, sci-fi tropes, Chris Crawford and flamewars in rec.*.int-fiction. Stiffy, previously a fairly generic blank-heterosexual AIF protagonist with a side of violent adolescent misogyny, was transformed into a voracious omnisexual with a taste for the outlandishly transgressive. It was both hugely trollish and unflappably good-natured, even if its primary objective seemed to be to give you the beginnings of a boner, then make you throw up, then make you choke with laughter and aspirate your vomit.

Mentula Macanus does much the same thing for the ancient Mediterranean, explicitly in the spirit of the Satyricon. (The title translates roughly as Stiffy Makane: Pumpkinification, a reference to a satire on the deification of Claudius.) The dick jokes are mostly about Classics, but there is also a heavy reliance on Graham Nelson’s Curses and a giant grab-bag of IF and literature. There are, at a really generous estimate, maybe five people in the world who will get all the jokes; you might want to read their reviews instead.

It is a considerably better game than The Undiscovered Country. Possibly this is because dirty jokes about Classics and T.S. Eliot are more likely to amuse me than dirty jokes about cheesy sci-fi. And possibly it’s because it’s not trying to be quite as gross as TUC. (Or maybe I’m just more jaded; it’s been a decade, so I should certainly hope so.) But it’s also an unambiguously better-made piece; larger, more polished, fairer, and designed like a game rather than a series of in-jokes. The lack of graphics helps, too. But it’s also much more of an actual sustained game, rather than a series of jokes strung together with a little railroaded gameplay; this is the first of the games that actually feels like an Incredible Adventures.

As with The Undiscovered Country (and, for that matter, the Satyricon), it sometimes feels just on the edge of actually functioning as erotica, but inevitably veers off into elision or squick. It’s very definitely not AIF, where the point is to sustain pornographic interest for long enough for the audience to get off; here the point is to briefly introduce pornographic interest, then make you spend the next fifteen minutes crawling through a sewer or trying to find a cure for your clap or butt-fucking the mummified corpse of Alexander the Great. But unlike TUC, it doesn’t seem centrally concerned with lambasting AIF; it’s serving its own purposes. (Primarily this is puerile sniggering. But Thornton can write a mean dick joke.)

Stiffy, in particular, is a long way from the original: he’s still primarily driven by sex, but he’s generally quite blase about it. He’s a gigantic perv, but he’s amiable about it. The whole world works by a sort of porn-logic; you can stroll around naked most of the time, your divinely glowing cock astounding passers-by. There’s none of the churning adolescent loathing of The Incredible Erotic Adventures or Kirk-sized ego of TUC. Stiffy’s eyes never pop out of his skull at the prospect of sex, and a great deal of the sex is glossed over or merely banal:

Of all the times you’ve ever boned a slatternly servant on a reeking mattress, this is certainly one of them.

The framing helps: Stiffy feels very much like the Golden Ass, self-centred and venal, pulled by misfortunes from pillar to post, jittering back and forth between comic indignity and sybaritic pleasure. And his quest is also in service of a goddess — in this case, Eris.

>fuck apple

It is pitch black in there. Your cock is likely to be eaten by a grue.[reference 6]

So the whole game is to be regarded as a Discordian exercise, of puncturing egos, poking fun at the serious and having a chaotic good time in the process. The mockery doesn’t necessarily imply dislike; the classics stuff is far deeper than a mere toga-party gloss (well, some of it; it’s perfectly happy to introduce characters called Biggus Dickus), and the subject matter all feels like something loved. (Apart from anything else, nobody who really disliked the notoriously difficult Curses would have persisted at it for long enough to be able to mock it this thoroughly.)

Structurally it gives the impression of a kind of wildly staggering fantastic journey, and at any rate Stiffy himself has only the vaguest idea of how the plot is meant to go. The action jumps around like a flea in a morgue, the narrative is fragmentary, the transitions frequently dangle by the slenderest of threads. It joyfully embraces anachronisms some of the time and then insists on accuracy at other points. But there’s method to the madness, sort of. After the introductory section you move to what looks like a standard adventure-game map, allowing you to travel back and forth between various regions; unlike the conventional adventure-game model, however, each location’s puzzles are pretty much self-contained, so there’s relatively little running back and forth. Rather than elaboration into a complicated content-unlocking exercise, however, this quickly returns to a linear sequence of smallish, self-contained maps with a few puzzles each. Some of feels kind of arbitrary — a jungle? Right, because we’re going after a banana, okay — but then there’s a genre-appropriate sequence of Hades and Olympus and a final judgment. It’s not very focused as satire, going after one thing and then another and then getting distracted and doing a cock joke instead. It makes sense as Attic comedy or Roman satire, which pulled shit as egregious as this all the time.

The puzzles themselves are generally pretty simple, but there are several easy ways to mess your play session up good and proper, and there is much instadeath. There are long sequences devoid of interaction. Formally, this is a game with a lot of design decisions that are either quite bad or somewhat dated. There is much in the way of side-treks and optional scenes, stuff you’ll miss if you play by the walkthrough, and stuff that (were the source not published) possibly one person might find. There’s nothing that could be described as a clever puzzle or elegant gameplay: it loudly proclaims the utterly conventional nature of its puzzles. There are dozens of NPCs, but all are quite shallow — each has a problem you can solve and a static set of conversation responses.

This old-school feel is lightened by a lot of modern conveniences, some more ostentatious than others (there’s a hint system that works by praying to obscure situation-specific deities.) And it’s full — or bloated — with features included mostly because they’re awesome. It’s dedicated to someone different every time you start play. There is both a footnote system and a references system (the latter both excessive and totally insufficient). >SCORE, naturally, lists everyone you’ve scored with. Including inanimate objects. This is clearly a game that was a great deal of fun to write, and that feeling is infectious; it’s the most entertaining game in this year’s Spring Thing. It’s also the most interesting, in spite of doing nothing that is technically very ambitious or avant-garde; it’s a romp, yes, but it’s romp as advocacy.

This is a game that makes writing and criticism, the whole enterprise of Art, seem like what it’s meant to be: something done for the joy of it. By two or more consenting adults.

maga

Editors’s note: Mentula Macanus can be downloaded, for free, here. It will work for Windows, Linux and the Mac. You’ll need an interpreter, but that link also tells you where to get that.

The raging battle between the Autobots and Decepticons continues in this exclusive title for the Commodore 64 computer. Take control of five different Transformers in the Autobots’ quest for Energon.

Transformers by Denton Designs

Back before fantastic graphics and CGI cut scenes, videogames often included additional paper documentation to explain who the characters where and what you were supposed to be doing. Atari, for example, packaged comic books with many of their games to add depth and back stories to their titles. Some early games relied so heavily on this documentation that without it, the games were difficult to play and didn’t make much sense. Ocean’s Transformers title was one of those games.

Like millions of other Commodore 64 owners in the 1980s, my primary source of software was the file areas of local bulletin board systems. Unfortunately for us, without documentation many of these free games were confusing, difficult, or even impossible to play. For example, the Commodore 64 version of Transformers contains absolutely no text explaining anything, leaving the point of the game largely a mystery and the game play mechanics an exercise in trial and error.

In the Transformers universe, the Autobots largely got the shaft by only being able to transform into cars and trucks, while the evil Decepticons convert into fighter jets. Let’s face it, who would choose a Volkswagen Beetle over a supersonic jet? Here, players get the opportunity to control Optimus Prime, Bumblebee, Jazz, Mirage and Hound. Each Transformer can only die once, giving players a total of five lives with which to complete the game. Each character can transform between their robotic and vehicular modes, although players will discover within five seconds that the four-wheeled modes are essentially worthless. At least in their robot forms the Autobots can shoot and fly. Yes, fly. Like Superman, all of the Autobots can fly through the air with a flick of the stick.

One new detail I don’t seem to recall from the comics or television series is that the Autobots in this game are constructed of fragile porcelain. The slightest fall or collision into the background will instantly transform your Transformer into a giant flaming fireball. In fact, the only thing that doesn’t kill you is the one thing you might think would; attacks from the evil Decepticons, of which there are seemingly unlimited numbers. Each Autobot has a finite amount of shields which are depleted by the Decepticons’ attacks. Theoretically once your shields are gone your character is destroyed. I’ve never been able avoid being killed by stepping off a platform long enough to find out.

For close to twenty years I had no idea what the point or goal of this game was. Only now through the wonders of the Internet was I able to track down the documentation and discover the game’s back story – not that the information makes the game any easier to play, mind you. Apparently the goal of the game is to collect pieces of Energon while battling Decepticons, but as I previously mentioned your Transformers are so fragile that even without the Decepticons buzzing around and shooting you in the head, you’re probably going to kill yourself within seconds anyway by flying into something or stepping off a platform.

Ocean Software’s Transformers opens with an impressive splash screen and some terrific sounding music. The in game graphics are a mixed bag; the characters are detailed enough to distinguish from one another, but the backgrounds are extremely plain. While Transformers fans may enjoy recognizing familiar characters and running around the levels for a few minutes, only the most adept gamers will be able to get anywhere in this challenging platformer.

Flack

It’s time to make cheeseburgers. In high definition!

Tdarcos

The BBS Documentary by Jason Scott

Good evening, and welcome to another exciting episode of… Ask The Reviewer!! Tonight we’re lucky enough to be joined by a man who definitely has to be considered a failure in his field, given a handful of half-assed reviews and meager, unwelcome additions to the annals of bulletin boarding. Ladies and gentlemen, let’s give a warm, “ATR” welcome to… Ice Cream Jonsey!

((APPLAUSE))

ATR: Hi, ICJ! How are you doing?

ICJ: Fine, yeah… fine.

ATR: Before we start, can you tell us about any new bulletin boards you’re currently working on?

ICJ: I’m trying to relaunch mine one last time before giving up and selling it to an Eastern Island handcuff pornographer.

ATR: Ohh… ka–

ICJ: It’s actually really hot stuff, and we’ll all think less of you for judging it. It’s how Jimbo Wales got started.

ATR: Jonsey, are there any misconceptions you’d like to clear up regarding Jason Scott’s BBS: The Documentary?

ICJ: I would, but much in the same way I yell at Caltrops forum poster Wittgenstein for acronyming soon-to-be-forgotten on-line role playing games, I would like to define a term. A BBS (bulletin board system) was (according to Wikipedia) a computer system running software that allows users to connect using a terminal program. I’d like to note that in most cases, a regular household landline was used. I’d add the previous bit directly to the Wikipedia, except I can’t attach gravy as Unicode to ensure it my revision would stick around. Anyway.

BBS: The Documentary is a three-disc DVD set that explores, for the first time, what we nerds were doing with our crappy 386s, 286s and even more hilariously, Apple IIGS computers back before there was much of a world wide web. The misconception that you might have is that you know all this shit already because you were there , man. Or that the thing couldn’t possibly be that good because the chronicler didn’t go to Buttmump, CO and interview your buddies Lord Aeriebringer, Raistlin Majere and the Warezwolf, three guys who you were convinced was at the forefront of the movement and whose opinions were absolutely critical for any sort of historical perspective.

I’m happy to say that it’s all nonsense. BBS: The Documentary doesn’t have to concern itself with what went on in your miserable whitebread suburb because the director went out and got a hold of people who built the actual hardware, wrote the actual software and cracked the actual games that the rest of us sponged from. There’s something to be said for authority.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. When you receive the package you’ll open it to find a professionally-designed DVD kit that opens and closes in on itself. (Unless you happened to have shot your snot-nosed mouth off about the project on the Internet, in which case the box looks something like this.) I have no idea what that packaging format is actually called, because all of the ratty movies I buy (or more accurately, get sent in the mail to me from Columbia House and then don’t quite get around to returning) use sleeves inferior to what this set comes in. If the guy who put out the Saw DVD, for instance, ever even so much as just looked at the packaging to this thing his eyes would catch fire and burst into lacrymotic slag. BBS: The Documentary is better presented than Half-Life II and Civ 4 for chrissakes.

Popping the first disc into the drive brings up a neat opening menu where you hear the banshee’s tele-keen of somebody trying to connect to a BBS. Perusing the director’s blog indicates that the phone number dialed is of the BBS that the director himself used to run, which is the sort of neat little effect that must have taken forever to do and demonstrates that more time and effort was spent on the opening of this documentary than of, say, the entire bugfix cycle of the phpBB project. Links to the first three episodes come up and I’m telling you, I was sitting there with my +2 bag of popcorn and Ebert’s Sinister Thumb just waiting for the first batch of losers to show up that couldn’t possibly be funnier and more important than my own gang and… we see the guy who made the first BBS. The guy who invented Fidonet. The guy who published a monthly magazine about BBSes. Okay, yeah… these guys are pretty important. Five minutes into the first episode it was obvious that real research done and real care was taken and hey, I was charmed.

I don’t know if this is the first movie that Jason Scott has made — I’m guessing that he has done a lo-fi slasher feature, a Bar Mitzfah, a student film in black & white — but it simply reeks of professionalism. You could totally see an episode of this being on PBS or free Canadian TV. The interviews have a great flow to them and when a specific segue is needed, the text appears on the screen in a big, friendly font. There’s maybe a couple such breaks in each episode, but they’re well-placed. The backgrounds that the interviewees are in front of are all different — you’ve got the guy in front of his pinball machines, the guy on top of his drum kit, the dude in front of an arcade-style Atari Jaguar machine and then a couple guys who seem to be in the hallway of a seedy motel. I’m convinced that at least one guy — the dude at the bowling alley — was cut and pasted in front of a matte painting due to the fact that he was truly homeless. (Which no doubt made it tough to buy a specific plane ticket for that interview session.) Scott consistently displays the name of who is speaking, the lack of which is common gripe I have with the genre. If I’m trying to identify the pinball game in the background the first time I see it, I appreciate seeing the interviewee’s name up on the screen later.

The most interesting of the 8 episodes was the one on FidoNet, that is… if you are a huge, hopeless tool. I had no idea that there was so much political in-fighting, anarchy, desire for less anarchy, tax problems and overhead with the system. I just completely took it for granted. It never once occurred to me that someone was calling up the hubs for mail each night and racking up enormous extensions in the process. That’s a true credit to FidoNet — it just worked. I can hardly send an e-mail to the cellphone of the guy the next cube over reliably, but FidoNet never dropped shit on me. If I wanted to troll WWIV bulletin boards from all over the world, I could absolutely do so through FidoNet and it never failed. Ha ha, I’m just kidding, you couldn’t interface WWIV with shit . You couldn’t specify someone for a “To:” field; you certainly weren’t getting ill-directed messages from outside the cul de sac with it. But FidoNet was a multiheaded cobra, with tails not knowing what the head and torso was up to. Great stuff, great insight, and only available on this disc.

If you’re not actually a social leper, well, then I highly recommend the episode about warez. It’s a real blast from the past to recognize that kids and twenty-somethings used to break copy protection without the benefit of a logic analyzer and then insert their own names on the introductory & load screens. This contrasts nicely from how things are done today — due to the fact that the feds will raid any group that gets too mouthy, everything is done without tying specific handles to specific releases. Not so in 1985. A cracker would put their handle on the screen in full lights, right next to Lord British and distanced nicely from his manservant Chuckles.

Unfortunately, it’s not all good. It’s my understanding that the warezed version sucks ass and is missing a bunch of stuff. I don’t hold the ripped version against the director, though, which sets me apart from most of the inane miscreants that had an inexplicable bug up their ass about it. I’m wearing really nice shades and smirking as I type this.

BBS: The Documentary is a fantastic DVD set and THE final word on bulletin board systems. I can’t recommend it strongly enough, especially to the kind of person likely to skulk about this website. I’m enough of a man to admit I wrong when I was discussing its price point on the BBS. But it hardly matters, as it’s now going for $40. You can buy yourself a copy by following this link.

***** out of five.

ATR: …

ICJ: …

ATR: So… there you have it folks! I think we all learned a little something tonight, and maybe we’ve gone a long way towards explaining a few things. Join us next time, when you’ll hear Benjamin “Pinback” Parrish pray for the cancerous death of anyone who’s ever come to this site.

Ice Cream Jonsey

Rift’s work/reward ratio is a lot better.

Rift by Trion Worlds Network

The Rifts are mostly “random” (in time, not place) and can be done by anything from 2-3 guys to a 40-man raid group. The more “public” quests are region-wide and have more in common with the Scourge/Lich King “invasion” holiday events from War of Warcraft than they do with Warhammer Online, with elite level mobs in swarms rushing towards quest hubs en masse while rifts pop up off the beaten paths…only more as a game feature instead of a once-a-year gimmick.

There’s a full on WOW-style crafting system for everything from accessories to weapons. There are weapon rewards for win streaks in the PVP battlegrounds, and the servers are cross-linked for battleground purposes. Warhammer Online was pure sodomy. Just a brutal, brutal level grind where from 9-10 was a days work, and if you hit every quest in the zone you just MIGHT make it to the end of the zone ready for the next tier of content at the appropriate level, and gear scaling was a joke. The level grind in Rift is nowhere near as soul-sucking, and the crafting/PVPing/questing/Rifting allows enough diversity that gear scaling is never a problem depending upon what you enjoy.

I’m still not sold on it at the moment. Up to level 15 and have yet to really be wowed. The capital for the Defiant side is really not nearly a treat in the same way that say, walking through Stormwind or Darnassus for the first time was, and I’ll admit that Bram wants to play it a lot more than I do, but it hasn’t yet actively made me feel like my time would be better spent pounding nails through my dick with a hammer the way Warhammer Online did around level 11 when you realized that you had pretty much experienced the gamut of the content from 1-10.

Ultimately, Rift doesn’t do anything particularly glaringly bad. It just doesn’t do anything particularly good either. It’s all territory we’ve been through before. It combines the best of WOW’s crafting and Warhammer Online’s battlegrounds and CoH’s Rikti invasions and even the dye system of Lord of the Rings Online. But the setting is fairly banal, the Guardian side is utterly vanilla (Dwarves, High Elves, and Fair-skinned Humans? Come on), the character generator is lacking (Aion spoiled me on that) and some of those little things I enjoyed so much in War of Warcraft or LOTRO, like flying over terrain on a flight path instead of immediately being transported from “here” to “there”, or the nuanced quirks that defined classes, such as that Mages could conjure their own drinks and food and distribute it to the party, or a Warlock’s soulstone and pet combinations are absent from the game.

All the skills you acquire are devoted to three things: Taking less damage, healing more damage, or doing more damage. And while the levelling system does lead to what I think will probably be a beautiful amount of end-game customization with a full set of points, linking skill acquisition to talent point investment means that you gain skills at a very dry rate of 1 skill every 2 levels or so.

I don’t want to try and compare this to War of Warcraft, a game that just came out can’t really be compared to the amount of content in a Massively-Multiplayer Online game that has been running for damn near seven years. I don’t really hate this game. I think I’m just too burnt out by the MMO formula. How many MMO’s can I play before I’m familiar with the drill to the point of apathy? If you really love MMO’s, Rift is decent enough to give you a few months of playtime. And who knows, with enough initial interest, they might tweak things sufficiently with v1.1 to make it even more enjoyable. But there’s nothing addictive about the gameplay that you can’t find at a pre-existing MMO in a much better format.

Verdict: Passable!

WITTGENSTEIN