Again With the Updating
Old article updates incoming. Perhaps I’ll start producing some original content here. Hard to say. In the meantime, I can say with confidence that I’ll continue to update my twitter timeline regular. Twitter profile here, feed here.
Flow, Flower, Floweriest
Would Flower suffer the same fate as Flow, I wondered? Would it be dismissed as yet another surreal, bite-sized advertisement for the PS3’s technical capabilities? It certainly garnered a lot of oohs and aahs from those who’d taken it for prerelease trial runs, but then again, so did Flow. And as I’d already discovered, the two games have a great deal in common. They both employ incredibly simple gestural controls. They’re both more suggestive than literal. And they’re both almost completely devoid of traditional videogame themes and imagery.
So where does Flower stand? It has only been a few days since its release, but the reviews I’ve read thus far have been extremely positive. The scores - for whatever they may be worth - are much higher for Flower than they were for its predecessor. More importantly, reviewers seem disinclined to dismiss Flower as another surreal geegaw. In fact, they’re often eager apologists for the game’s most unconventional attributes. Words like “euphoric” “and “fulfilling” abound.
(read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)
Cold Comfort in Operation Anchorage
Imagine a single quest line ripped from Fallout 3’s wide-open environment and packaged as a single piece of content, and you’ll have a pretty good idea of what Operation: Anchorage feels like. Though it does allow players to complete certain story objectives in the order and fashion they see fit, it provides almost none of the free-roaming fun of the original game. Instead, it channels players down paths in a manner much more reminiscent of first-person shooters.
Fallout 3 is no first-person shooter, though, and its limitations in this regard are a bit more obvious in Operation Anchorage than they were in the original game. The awkward aiming and quirky enemy AI feel less forgivable. And waging war with mostly conventional weapons and enemies isn’t nearly as novel as fighting mirelurks with a handcrafted Shiskebab or tossing Nuka-Grenades at deathclaws.
(Read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)
Don’t Keep it Real
As I watched my wife work her way through Wind Waker’s introductory scenes last week, I couldn’t help but note how beautiful it still was. With the exception of some subtle aliasing, it hardly looked dated. The cartoonish aesthetic is as charming and unique now as it was then, and the animation easily rivals that of any game I’ve played in the past year.
Is it presumptuous to deem a game “timeless” only six years from its initial release? Probably. But Wind Waker still strikes me as a game whose beauty and depth will be readily apparent decades from now.
(read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)
Far Cry 2’s Incendiary Nonsensibility
I’m enjoying my trip through Far Cry 2’s nameless African state so far. I’ll admit it’s not the most inviting place, what with all the local warmongering and civil unrest in the wake of its governmental collapse. And I’d be farther along in my hunt for the Jackal, a notorious and enigmatic arms dealer, were it not for the malaria epidemic.
(read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)
Immaterial Things
For the past several nights, I’ve spent hours on end experimenting with the LittelBigPlanet level creator. I’m sure I’ve spent a few dozen hours with its robust content creation tools since its release. I’ve had a blast, and I’m really pleased with the stuff I’ve built. I’ve grown to think of it as virtual model building.
I feel like the guy who labors at his hobby desk for weeks, meticulously crafting a sailing ship or model airplane. Except I’m fiddling with analog sticks instead of an X-Acto knife, and carving up make-believe materials instead of balsa wood. And, unlike the hobbyist who has something tangible to show for his or her efforts, my accomplishments vanish when I switch off my PlayStation 3.
(read the rest of this article over at the Escapist)
Update Incoming
Time to get this blog up to date. I’m just gearing up for a ton of retroactive posts. All old stuff, almost all at The Escapist.
Waypoints: Failing, Falling, and Feeling
Since their recent releases, Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia have both garnered abundant attention for their stylish visuals and unique platforming, and they’ve both come under fire from reviewers and gamers for certain design elements. Take a closer look at the complaints leveled against each game, and you’ll see a curious set of contradictions.
(Read the rest of this article over at The Escapist)
Waypoints: Many Lancers Make Light Work
The group I game with consists mostly of folks in their late twenties to early forties, often married, and often with kids. We haven’t got a lot of patience for the cultural cesspool that is anonymous online gaming. We don’t have the reflexes we’d need to compete at the level of the average Mountain Dew-fueled high school or college kid. And we haven’t got the time to learn the layout of every map or the attributes of each weapon in a given game.
As a result, we’ve long since abandoned action multiplayer mainstays like Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament. Halo deathmatches have limited appeal. In fact, with the advent of this new console generation, I, like many of my gaming friends, had all but thrown in the towel on multiplayer action games.
But co-op brought us back. And co-op is now how we prefer to game.
(Read the rest of this article at The Escapist)
Waypoints: I Slay the Bodies Electric
Here they come. Twisted hunks of gristle and entrails shuffle down the corridor toward me, waving long, menacing spikes of bone in my direction. I ready my sawgun.
Just before they’re in striking distance, I send out a blade. It hovers in midair for a brief moment before I begin dragging it across the necromorphs’ joints. Blood spatters, limbs fall to the floor, and the creatures shriek and crumple before me.
This isn’t combat. It’s butchery.
(read the rest of this article at The Escapist)