Here’s the first hour of the game as I play it for the first time and chat to Bill, who’s played it before. This picture sums up my initial impressions.
Category: Features
Irregular Columns
Unlikely Partnerships – A Tale of Two Detectives
King of the Jungle
It’s 2 am.
We just held a party at this house. Pre-drinks included some sort of Wii Fit Plus championship. It was Ok. Obviously I didn’t take part because Wii Fit Plus is an uncool, casual, kiddy extravaganza, and any fun the party guests were having was just hollow, fake fun, compared to the hardcore gaming experiences they could be having. Their laughter, hollow, fake laughter. Obviously such shallow gameplay couldn’t hold them so we had to walk to the pub to continue the night. We arrived at the pub and they said they were closing, the bottleshop was still open so we bought a couple more cartons and walked home, knowing only the despair of Wuhu Island awaited us.
Upon returning, the unwashed masses returned to their Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit Plus, gleaming whatever hollow enjoyment they could out of the household’s two Wii boxes; the second Wii, purchased by my casual gaming housemate, symbolising the kind of callous opulence Australians lived in during the naive days of Emperor Rudd and his economic stimulus packages. The other hardcore gamers and I discussed hardcore subjects like international communism, capitalist-anachronism, and the scourge of democracy in holding back this society from ideological purity. But as the beer and goon ran dry, so too did the crowd thin out, the short lived thrills of Wii Basketball running thin. Desperate for companionship, and the cheeseburgers retrieved from the mainstream, 24 hour Mcdonalds, the hardcore gamers and I went back to the living room.
“What silly game are the bongo drums for?” asked the most beautiful girl in attendance. I glanced over at the gimmicky, novelty plastic drums and fished out the game so desperately attached to them, so obviously strangled at the design stage and shoehorned with ridiculous sound based controls.
There are so many ways you could demean this game.
F***heads – Iwata on a Mission
3DS Wall Update
Hey, how have you guys been?
What?
Where have I been?
Mostly looking for work which is pretty hard to find where I am. I know I promised bimonthly updates to the Wall, but truth be told not a lot of movement in 3DS games happened initially after the first publication.
But enough about that, let’s get down to brass tacks. As usual, the only criteria is that a company has to have released a game or have finalized (or near such) boxart with a release date. Boxarts are followed by GameRankings Averages of each title and the company’s library as a whole.
Two ways to do a content subscription service
Those of you who’ve been paying careful attention to Electronic Arts, and really you have no excuse not to, would know they’re pretty interested in this whole internet thing and how it could be leveraged to provide a constant revenue stream from increasingly dependent consumers. They’ve been pulling their games from Steam and relaunched Origin, the developer of Ultima they purchased a decade ago, as a digital distribution client, the only place to buy new multi million dollar MMO: Star Wars: The Old Republic. And then they ruined my birthday by announcing a subscription service to their sports games.
Now here’s what EA are planning to do.
- The privilege of downloading their sports games a few days before EB Games put it on display and slap pre-owned stickers on last year’s edition.
- Discounts on downloadable content, including on disc DLC.
- Permission to use that purchased content on future roster updates.
- Stats recorded on a webpage that you can browse with your internet communication gizmo.
- A little badge so everyone knows you’re an idiot paying for the above.
I know right, some sort of joke. The very fact that EA’s offering, if I can indulge you and call it that, can be summarised down to five bulletpoints shows you everything wrong with their approach. You can’t summarise Xbox Live or Steam in 5 dot points and you shouldn’t be able to summarise EA’s either. If EA want to charge a subscription then they have to at least be on that level, offer a service of their own on the scale of Xbox Live. They’re a big company and their sport games cater to a big market – they can do it. God knows they want to do it but they’re too cowardly to try. The next few paragraphs I’m going to envision how they should run a subscription service that fosters the kind of sycophantic devotees, who’ll maintain their subscriptions indefinitely.
Continue reading “Two ways to do a content subscription service”
How I fell in love with Dragon Quest
Dragon Quest has gone from being a series I’d never played or cared for, to one of my favourite series in gaming in the space of a year. It all started with the release of Dragon Quest IX; I decided to give it a chance because I love most other RPGs on DS and I wanted to see what the series was all about. IX seemed like the most accessible one yet, and the canvass mode also intrigued me.
From Chat: 9 minutes in Hyrule
Pro was sampling some Legend of Rehash 3D during a chat. Somehow, old gaming led to current events.
Pro Daisy: ok, Wind Waker’s most important innovation is the R-trigger block pull
Pro Daisy: none of this climb/grab bullshit
Pro Daisy: uh oh, link is in the garden, CALL HOMELAND SECURITY
Bill Aurion: haha, yeah, climb/grab is annoying, particularly when you are in a hurry (after hitting a timed switch)
Pro Daisy: castle courtyard
Pro Daisy: this is my big chance
Pro Daisy: to kill zelda
Pro Daisy: if i kill her now, none of this Celda, this Waggle, this Wii would’ve happened
Pro Daisy: change the course of history forever
Bill Aurion: can’t change DESTINY
Pro Daisy: how did i get past the guards? fake ID and shoe bombs
Pro Daisy: this scene in the courtyard with zelda… has huge significance in the industry
Pro Daisy: i bet this is where many future game designers began their “games are art” erections
Pro Daisy: “I am Zelda, Princess of Hyrule. What is your name?”
Pro Daisy: “…”
“MY NAME IS REGGIE”
Pro Daisy: “Strange… it sounds shomehow… familiar.”
“You saw our E3 presentation?”
Grubdog: the triforce of KICKIN ASS
Grubdog: the triforce of TAKIN NAMES
Grubdog: the triforce of MAKIN GAMES
Pro Daisy: 
!!
Bill Aurion: the triforce of NOT LOCALIZING GAMES
Grubdog: thats covered in #2
Bill Aurion: HRRRRN 
Operation Rainfall’s biggest challenge
It’s not from Nintendo. It’s not language barriers or translation issues. It’s not some greedy CEO who gets a hard-on from punishing people. It’s the gaming media, and so called “fans” who are threatening boycotts and trolling Wii just like they’ve been doing since 2006.
You’re playing it right – Rune Factory: Frontier
After 2 slow years – more than 220 hours of inconsistent on-off indulgent gameplay – I had gotten to a desired level of satisfaction in Rune Factory: Frontier. Can’t quite say that I wasted lots of time, since I savored so much of it. Full of repetitive (but profitable) tasks, blushing faces, sexy voicework, and adorable chitchat, I consider this to be my “Animal Crossing”; a relaxed, low-intensity enjoyment of cleverly interconnected content that doesn’t get tossed out after the first-month’s internet hype has already died and found something new to whine about. My Game of the Years, indeed.
In one (real time) week of play (last month) did all the crazy stuff come crashing at the end of the game’s calendar year: got MARRIED on FISTMAS EVE, beat the MAIN QUEST, started another SPRING SEASON, skipped thru SPRING SEASON, and entered a world of brand new CUTE BATHING SUITS. While the timing was incredible, I didn’t exactly plan it this way (the bikinis had been the Top-Priority! above all else)(and I didn’t cheat my way out of Runey management, BILL). The rapid chain of rewards/events simply served to amplify the sense of accomplishment. So much hawtness in such a short time.
Below, I share my joy. (JUICY SUMMER TIME IMAGERY, AHOY)
Continue reading “You’re playing it right – Rune Factory: Frontier”
F***heads – Delayed Irony
Presidential Midsummer Recap
We revisit the suspenseful, exciting past quarter of the gaming industry, as witnessed by U.S. President Barack Obama.
Obama and his advisory team closely monitoring the PSN outage. Tension is at an all-time high.
F***heads – Lucasarts, May The Force Be Without You
Nintendo E3 2011 Press Conference Premonition
People will call me a hippy when I say this but I’ve always felt a resonance with Nintendo consoles. They speak to me through channels I can’t describe. This isn’t some delusional fanboy shit – this is real hippy waves of energy that you just gotta feel, man. When Project Dolphin was announced I was living on a tropical island in the Pacific; when Project Revolution was announced I was a political activist; and for the past year or so I’ve worked as a barista.
Project Café.
Today I was working and thinking a lot about E3 and how it was going to change my life and give me new meaning and direction, man. I looked down at the latte I was making and there I saw it: everything I needed to know about Project Cafe. I was just like Agent Morgan from Deadly Premonition, ciphering messages from the milk and coffee. I stared at it in a trance and it all came to me. This is how it will take place at E3…
Continue reading “Nintendo E3 2011 Press Conference Premonition”
On the Next Episode of Dorky Dad
With the kids out on Kamp Kinect for the weekend, Dorky Dad finally has some time to himself!
But oh no!
Pietriots 