Yesterday I took us through the dreadful hockey component of Mario Sports Mix, today I played all the way through the game’s basketball campaign, which is probably a sign that it is slightly better quality than hockey. What is not better though are the ‘screenshots’ of me taking photos of the screen with the worst digital camera on the market (iPhone 3Gs). After receiving positive feedback on yesterday’s shots for their clarity and resolution, today I present you with this:
So being the (field) hockey superstar that I am, when I jammed the Mario Mix disc into my Wii’s slot I went straight to Hockey. Over the next 4 days I’ll try out the other sports and give impressions of them but all I’ll say right now is that if the rest of the game is anything like hockey, then Mario Sports Mix has forever ruined Mario’s good sportsman-like reputation. Since I know some of you don’t click the ‘continue reading’ button on our site, this picture which I’ll leave on the frontpage shows everything wrong with hockey in Mario Sports Mix. The photo was taken on my iPhone because that’s the only image quality you weak scumbags deserve.
A lot of people wet their pants when they heard the eShop (worst name ever) would not be ready for the 3DS launch in Japan or America. I know I wet my pants and it was super embarrassing because I was riding public transport when I found out. I’ve driven 300km to a small fishing community to do some soul searching on the whole issue. Last night I found myself at the local watering hole, and over a pint I told a local about the problem and why I had to escape the city. The 47 year old enstranged father of 3 tells me “Fucken who cares? The iPhone didn’t have an App Store at release in America either.” I nodded and we went our separate ways.
It’s all going to be ok. 🙂
With the east coast of Australia underwater, the North American continent buried under snow and the Korean peninsula on the brink of nuclear war, gamers across the world have even more reason to bunker down on the comfort of their couches and the warmths of their computer. The dangerous world outside does present a problem though; how to acquire more games? The leader in digital distribution has capitalised on this captive market and this year’s Steam sales have been destructive to gamer wallets. It’s been a storm of it’s own to weather, one in our mind, to restrain ourselves and avoid the perils of credit card debt.
There is some sort of addictive quality to cheap games. I’ve bought games I previously had no interest in like Mass Effect. I heard the second one won a few awards this year so I got that and then though I might as well get the first so I know what’s going on. Then there’s other games, like Assassin’s Creed that I thought I bought, but in the long line of transactions I guess I haven’t. There are other games that I’ve decided for one reason or another to just wait and buy at the last moment of the sale, like Eufloria. There’s other games like the Tomb Raider spinoff thing but I didn’t get that, despite it going on sale twice. There’s also SimCity 4. It’s on sale right now, I’ve already bought this game twice but my brain is telling me if I get it on steam, I wont need the CD!
And of course, in typical steam sale tradition, the only games I’ve played while hiding from the jellyfish that infest this retirement village my parents call home are SimCity 4 and Osmos, which I picked up from the Humble Bundle. Might post some Osmos impressions tomorrow or tonight, it’s an absorbing (lol puns) game.
How I know I’m not the only person who has the problem of buying games and never getting around to playing them. Well today in JB Hi-Fi I developed a simple method to determine if you buy too many games.
If you are shopping for games, and you see a game that you want but you hesitate and the reason you hesitated is because you’re not sure if you already own the game or not, then you own too many games.
Today I bought Fragile Dreams, I still had another $50 of JB Hi-Fi vouchers to spend to I nearly bought Zack and Wiki ($20), Guilty Gear XX ($20) and Little King’s Story (also $20). Not only that but I had to note them down on my iPhone just so I would remember them and on the phone I found an open note containing a list of MORE games that I was double checking I owned or not.
Turns out I did already own Zack and Wiki. What’s it like?
So I have recently been playing some Tales of Symphonia as inspiration for SimCity 4. You read that right. Also I swear the game wasn’t this blurry when I played it before but whatever. We were in chat, not updating Pietriots, when Bill brought up the topic of the Tales games. For those unfamiliar, Tales is Namco’s unpopular, increasingly Japan-exclusive, role-playing game. I started rambling.
RABicle: Bloody, forgot how big Symphonia is, shit just keeps happening.
RABicle: At no point does the game calm down.
RABicle: At one point it was sorta calm, I had just stolen the Rhieards and landed outside the Earth Temple, Raine suggested we go in, I didn’t have to but I did anyway.
Grubdog: It’s crazy
RABicle: And after that regal mentioned the ice temple near Flanoir, so that bit was kinda quiet.
Grubdog: See, Square-Enix are smart, they have nice tempo changes in their games when you have to grind for 4 hours. Great way to mix things up.
RABicle: but as soon as I get Celsius in the ice dungeon Ozette is on fire
Grubdog: lol
Bill Aurion: It’s how RPGS should be.
Bill Aurion: gotta keep my interest or I’m binning you.
So there were a bunch of sales on Steam and as usual I was too tentative to buy anything. $5 for 5 indy games? But I already own two and two more of them aren’t Mac compatible! And this fifth game. VVVVVV? Is this the stupidest name ever? A more courageous friend of mine did buy the pack though and a few days ago I played it his place. The next time I could touch my computer I bought this $5 masterpiece.
What I love about the internet is the ability to get totally lost forever in it. Jump through enough links and you can find all sorts of treasures. The best treasures to find though are lovingly crafted niche websites that embody everything that was wonderful about Web 1.0. It’s 3:30 in the morning on Easter Saturday and I’ve found the perfect site to kick off this new feature of our site, or blogroll category as Web 2.0 jingo defines it. Presenting: Portable Mortal Kombat.
So as I do I was scrolling through the App Store looking for something new to play. The App Store is insidious in nature, trapping gullible people like myself into impulse purchases. I was browsing the top 25 selling role playing games and this title, Bar Oasis, caught my eye. A game based around working at a cocktail bar with dozens of different cocktail recipes? Original, but I wasn’t sold until I saw the screenshots, focusing on the breasts of the bar’s female clientele and a review from, self described tradie, Aussie123212 who claimed he was unable to put it down.
Reggie and I had a coffee last week and we had a lot to catch up on. Turns out he’s been so busy kicking arse, taking names and running NOA that he hasn’t even had time to plan E3 in years, let alone get Fatal Frame 4 or Disaster: Day of Crisis localised. Who has been planning E3 then? You guessed it, Cammie Dunaway. Last E3 was a real kerfuffle if you recall my entry last year. Cammie told me they had already done the conference inside an L.A. McDonalds and it involved Reggie fighting everyone. You can just imagine my sense of betrayal when the actual conference took place and Reggie was restrained to talking about sales while Cammie embarrassed herself in front of the gaming community again. I was telling Reggie over coffee that it was these lies that forced me to sleep with Cammie’s daughter out of spite and cause the breakdown of our relationship.
It has to be said: Reggie is such an understanding and caring man. He looks me square in the eye and tells me that I did the right thing to cheat on Cammie with her daughter. He goes on though to explain that, despite my virtuous actions, Cammie had fallen into a state of despair. In her desperate state, the currently scheduled conference was to be her coming out on stage and performing interpretive dance of projected 2011 sales figures to the tune of a Super Mario Bros ringtone. Reggie explained that it was up to me to track Cammie down, cheer her up and deliver a solid E3 script. I asked if we needed a high concept one like my rejected Animal Crossing proposal or actually do the McDonald’s conference from last year. Reggie told me that we just had to keep it simple because planning time was short. Reggie payed for our coffee with a $100 note and left before they could give him change.
Continue reading “Pietriots.com Exclusive! A Sneak Peak at the Nintendo E3 Conference”
Well I took one for the team and opted to miss the first half of the Italy vs. Paraguay game to watch the Xbox E3 show something something thingy. Just bullet points because who can be bothered typing words?
Well it was a fairly safe show from Xbox. At no point did they dare upset the crowd by revealing just how much Kinect would cost, only that it would launch in time for Xmas.
Yoshi’s Story gets dismissed as a weak, childish game because of its apparent simplicity and forgiving difficulty. Really though, it is one of the most intelligently designed games ever made. It is one of the only games, if not the only game, to successfully and adequately deal with the concept of losing ‘lives.’
I have an old family friend a few years younger than me. His first console was an N64 and Yoshi’s Story one of his first games alongside Super Mario 64. When I first played Yoshi’s Story at his house I enjoyed it, but invited him to try my copy of Yoshi’s Island on Super Nintendo. He played and enjoyed that but something bothered him and he confronted me about it. He had two extremely interesting questions that to this day I remember because I could not adequately answer them;
“When Baby Mario got taken, how come I had him again at the start of the level?”
“Blue Yoshi died but when I tried the level again I was Blue Yoshi, why?”
Imagine a seven year old asking you that.
Games have always dealt with the concept of death or failure. Yet for some reason, everyone seemed happy to just go along with the idea of ‘lives’ or chances. You might typically start with 3, like baseball “third strike – you’re out.” Unlike baseball, you might actually achieve something before you lose a life and then get to start over. And unlike baseball, you might collect new chances, typically by running over an icon that resembles the avatar’s head. If a video game is an interactive narrative you play out and then you fail, it is as if the events that just played out had never happened and we were starting fresh. Like a blooper, left on the cutting room floor of a movie editing studio. A long time ago it was simply decided that games would adopt this format and no game ever challenged that, until Yoshi’s Story.
As gamers, we have probably forgotten how long ago or how quickly we mentally tore down these logical problems with games. Who knows, maybe it was 30 seconds in that we decided that was just how things were in games. It didn’t matter if you died because you could just start again from where you left off, unless you got ‘game over’. Gamers raised on today’s titles might not even be aware of the ‘game over’ concept, since it was a convention of arcade machines that had to stop you playing all day. But for those people who played Yoshi’s Story, like my buddy Angus, they didn’t encounter this flaw in game mechanics until they branched out. In Yoshi’s Story you start the game not with six lives, but six Yoshi’s, each an individual. If they die, they don’t come back ever. There is no ‘Game Over’ screen in the old sense: if you lose your last yoshi, you have actually failed to protect them, the last of their species, and caused evil to reign forever.
This ties into the game’s name: Yoshi’s Story. It is a story, a pop-up book as the game presents it, and stories do not have mid-sentence revisions. There is no flicking back and reading from the beginning of the page again if you stuffed up in Yoshi’s Story. The events that unfolded always matter and form part of the story. “The red yoshi failed and was taken, crying, to Baby Bowser’s castle” is part of the story and then the green yoshi or whoever has to pick up the pieces. You can even gain new chances in Yoshi’s Story in the form of locating and saving the two stranded yoshis hidden in the game. It is a game that, without removing the convention of extra chances, creates a logical reason for events.
Yoshi’s Story is incredible in that it never ever breaks real life logical boundaries and sustains a narrative. And for that it must be applauded.
As the page turned, the Yoshis all grew happier.
Last night I had Cammie Dunaway over. I found it unusual that she’d be in Perth this close to E3 so I said “You’re not leaving yourself much time.”
“Hehe, for what sweety?” Cammie replied.
“E3 of course, it took me over 24 hours to fly to L.A.”
“Oh we’ve already done it silly.”
“Done E3? The press conference and everything?”
“Yeah we recorded it last week, everyone who attended is under an NDA. Only the internet hasn’t found out yet, hehehe.”
This was a lot for me to take in so I motioned for her to get back to sucking my cock. Over the next hour, when she came up for a breather, she filled me in on what happened.
All I ever hear these days is “casual this” “casual that” and they’re always talking about the same thing; Nintendo. There is NO SUCH THING as casual and hardcore, there is no distinction, you guys should shut up because no one is listening to your nonsense. What like Mario Kart is casual now? Didn’t anyone inform the guys slaving away for the continental time trial charts? Halo is hardcore? Why do I find people who know nothing about games know about Halo? Your distinctions are fucked. RPGs are hardcore? My Grandmother, who is arthritic and 84 years old LOVES RPGS because they don’t require any dexterity from her and she can just enjoy a fantasy epic. She plays them on her PS2.
‘Casual’ is just the new word losers use to malign Nintendo. They used to use the word ‘kiddy’, remember that? “Oh Nintendo is just kiddy crap, get a PS2 for real mature games where you shoot guys.” Of course they can’t use kiddy anymore now that their aunt owns a DS the television is saturated with advertisements marketing Wii at adults. Not the so called ‘mature,’ 15 year old boys, but directly to gen X and baby boomers. ‘Casual’ is the new ‘kiddy’, just like ‘mature’ was superseded by ‘hardcore.’ But there is an actual word that all these clowns mean when they say hardcore or casual or mature; ‘Cool’ and ‘Uncool’. That’s what you mean. Wii Play is ‘uncool’.
The real question is; why dont the idiot legions of the internet, the soldiers in the trenches of the console wars use the words cool and uncool? Because deep down, they know they’re losers and there is nothing cool whatsoever about video games. The guy talking at a party about Fallout 3 isn’t the life of it. Guitar Hero champions aren’t going to be doing ads for Pepsi. And now they’re threatened because actual cool people are getting into games, casual games.
Can you believe this game came out in 2003? I played it in January of 04, buying a US copy and Freeloader for GameCube; I was just that excited about it. I remember the announcement way back in 2002 and the details were basically: Jordan Mechner returns to video games, new Prince of Persia, Splinter Cell team. I already had a boner but a little while after, when the first render of the Maharajah’s palace was released, I ejaculated everywhere. So yeah, I was that excited about it and I was still completely blown away by every aspect of the game.
So yesterday as I dwelled on the fact that I didn’t have anything capable of running the new Prince of Persia and with my new A/V cables arriving for my PS2 (I had since sold all my non-PAL GameCube games and re-acquired the game on PS2) I threw it in again, intending only to test out the A/V cables. Anyway, so half an hour ago I beat it. Holy shit. I’m dehydrated or something, everyime the Prince drank from water I wanted to drink, but the kitchen was too far away so I stayed put. Anyway, let me go through my thoughts on this game 5 years after the event.
Visually I remembered the game looking better than this. Now, a lot of this could be due to the fact that I’m replaying it on PS2 which we all know was a DVD-capable Dreamcast. I definitely recall there being a lot more bloom lighting on the GameCube. Now despite what I’ve just said, the game still looks incredible. I totally forget that they included a button mapped to L2 that is there just to show off the graphics. You hit it and the camera zooms out and puts itself at an angle that just lets you appreciate the fantastic art that went into this game. Every single area looks absolutely first class and is polished to perfection. Nothing looks bland; nothing looks out of place; the game is spectacular throughout. I’m just certain it used to be even more of a spectacle.
Level design is amazing. I would enter an area and it would all be familiar because I’ve played it before, but it was still a challenge because I didn’t remember how. I’d be all “oh cool this is the giant aviary bit” or “oh the mess hall” but it was fun going through it all again because the specifics were all hazy. What really makes the level design though is how organic it all feels. Every single area feels like it could be a legitimate part of the palace. It really struck me how you could look at the room and it would look real, yet hidden in it was the video game’s platforming path. The rubble that might help or hinder your path through any given room never seemed out of place although the occasional crate did. Crates are always big problems in games and to their credit, Ubisoft – sorry, I mean Jordan Mechner – only included about, oh, 4 in the entire game.
Game combat was as dull as I remembered, although the order of enemies felt different for whatever reason. I dunno, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t vault over this many enemies last time and had to resort to wall jumps. Also, I swore the final guys you fought all blocked wall jumps but they were blocking vaults for me this time. I was all confused. Perhaps the game adapts to your playstyle! Somewhat related to combat is the whole mess regarding collecting extra sand. Throughout the game you can stab your dagger into these glowing things to increase the size of your sand vial. This gives you more opportunities to rewind time whenever you die, insult Farah and so forth. However, it also makes it much much harder for you to execute the Mega-Freeze, by far the most useful combat ability. Instead of using a set amount of power, the mega freeze uses ALL your power. So early on in the game you can pull it off, collect sand from 8 fallen enemies to refill it and do it again. By the end of the game, you might do it at the start of a fight and then not have enough baddies left to fight to use it, or any ability for that matter, again. I guess that can help with the difficulty but it almost serves as a reason to avoid collecting more sand vials.
Actually, just an aside here. The parallels between Sands of Time and 2002’s ICO are incredibly strong. Both have huge, realistic feeling environments, both have monotonous, simple combat against pretty much the same enemies throughout, both have large scale puzzle solving. Both won Penny Arcade’s prestigious We’re Right awards. The big difference in terms of game design is that Sands of Time had some. Like, if you’ve played ICO, you’ll know that you can explore free range, with very little inaccessible and what not. The problem is while you can explore, there is nothing to find and all these extra areas are boring. Sands of Time cuts all that bullshit out, keeping you focused and in the right direction while piling on it’s carefully scripted, carefully paced awesome. Fuck ICO – I can’t believe I just gave it the compliment of being compared to Sands of Time.
The relationship between the Prince and Farah is still fascinating. It’s the best love story of any video game I’ve ever played, if only because of how subtle it is. Early on in the game, if you glare at her with the first person view, she’ll get all uppity and tell you to stop staring. By the end, she’ll comment on the colour of the Prince’s eyes. And of course the Prince’s thoughts on her that he expressed while they’re apart as just as funny and brilliantly written second time round. He tries to hide (from himself) his feelings for her through – shit, my vocabulary has failed me. I’m not good with feelings. He acts full of himself through chauvinism and because his country just kicked her country’s arse in war. He acts like he’s doing her a massive favour just by existing but deep down you can tell he feels guilty for what he’s done and feels intimidated by her. Classic writing and well acted.
Oh and the game’s ending. I remember the first time, when it pulled it’s twist on me I was blown away. If you haven’t played the game by now you probably never will so I’m going to ruin it for you: At the very start of the game, like you don’t even think about it, it acts as if it’s part of the menu, you walk through some curtains and a cutscene plays as the Prince narrates a tale, talking in the past tense. Throughout the game you’ll hear the narration over the gameplay and humourosly whenever the Prince (or Farah) dies he says something to the effect of “wait… that didn’t happen, I didn’t fall off.” When you pause he’ll ask “shall I continue?” Now it’s natural to assume that you, the player, is the Prince’s audience. Maybe you might also see it as a nod towards 1001 Tales of the Arabian Nights, as if this story was just one of those 1001 tales. In the game’s gripping climax, the Prince plunges the Dagger of Time into the Sands of Time, resulting in the rewinding of time all the way back to the night before the attack on India that serves as the game’s tutorial. The opening cinematic plays again but this time is elaborated on. As the Prince utters the same words he used to begin the game you see that he is in fact telling the story to Farah, in order to warn her of the attack and the traitorous Vizier. It is so, so clever. The Vizier then comes in to ruin everything and you have a terrible final boss battle against him. It’s neither difficult or fun, but that doesn’t matter because there is still time for one last, piss funny, use of the dagger of time to end the game. The credits roll and you get to hear a great song, it’s like Portal, a full fisted, tightly directed game with a song at the end.
Anyway fuck yeah this game is unbelievable. Time to play through Warrior Within and Two Thrones and see if they’re as bad as I heard. I don’t have much faith since neither involved Jordan Mechner but we’ll see.
Pietriots 