Baud Attitude

I tried to run through Dead Rising a couple of times, and didn’t do very well.

Attempt 1 (several months ago): Die to first boss fight after not having saved for over an hour. Put the game aside in disgust, not realizing that I can just start over and keep all the XP I’ve gained.

Late last night: pick it up again.

Attempt 2: Beat first boss, but let Brad die to zombies.

Attempt 3: Beat first boss, keep Brad alive, actually progress the story a little ways, then die trying to get in to the security room through a door that I’d forgotten was now welded shut.

Attempt 4: I started attempt 4, and then had a thought.

Time progresses at a fixed pace. My helicopter pilot will be back in 72 game hours (6 real-world hours) regardless of what I do, right?

I came home from work on my lunch break. I started a game.

I took some photos of Willamette as we flew over it.

I got Frank to the couch in the security room. I saved there.

And went back to work. I figured I’d come home and find myself eaten by zombies anyway.

Five hours later, I got home from work.

Frank was still standing there, so I took him up to the roof, then went and browsed Kotaku and the penny arcade forums for a while.

Right on schedule, my helicopter landed and I got 20 points of Gamerscore for surviving for 3 days. It seems as though I’d also gotten 20 Gamerscore just for staying inside so long. I got 50000 bonus XP for living, and gained two levels.

Obviously I didn’t get the “good ending”, and I’m not going to count this as “beating” the game, but I thought it was pretty funny.

It’s true.

Even though everyone is pretty much OK with Germany these days and has been for 60-odd years, Nazis are still considered pretty much fair game to gun down in videogames.

This makes them one of the two Top Videogame Bad Guys, the other top pick being zombies.

Nobody minds when you shoot zombies, either.

I am given to understand that there have been quite a few games based on World War II, taking advantage of the fact that Nazis don’t have any advocacy groups, but it’s not really my genre. I like cute, and there’s not much cute about WWII shooters.

Mind you, being a shallow male, I am easily swayed by busty half-vampires in skin-tight leather outfits, so I do own Bloodrayne, which features Nazis aplenty. It’s not really a historical simulation, though. It’s also not cute, but it’s, uh, it’s, uh, did I mention the skin-tight leather outfits?

And is “skin-tight” hyphenated, or two words, or is it just one word, “skintight”? I am not sure, and the spell checker doesn’t complain about any of them. I’ll go with hyphenated.

All that aside, the group of guys I game with on Wednesday nights play a whole lot of various shootin’ games, and so I wound up buying Call of Duty 2, since it was cheaper than buying Rainbow Six Vegas or Gears of War, the other games they play a bunch of.

And I played through the training mode, and got the 50 easiest achievement points I’ve ever gotten, and then mostly played multiplayer online.

And, I got my butt whupped a bunch. So I thought, well, let’s try the single player game and see how that goes and maybe I’ll get a little better.

I don’t know if that’s actually happened, but I did wind up playing through the entire single player campaign. It didn’t manage to convert me into a raving historical FPS fanboy, but I will admit that it’s a pretty solid game and if I had more interest in the source material I’d probably be raving about it.

Gamerscore +150 for “Winning the war” means that I have cracked the 1K barrier. I am mighty.

This leaves me with two Xbox360 games to finish. “Prey” and “Dead Rising”.

One of those features Zombies… 🙂

I don’t know as I’d call it Perfect, but it was pretty good.

One of the absolute worst “money spent” to “games completed” ratios I’ve ever had was buying a Nintendo 64. It did have some quality games – I won’t dispute that – but I owned one for a full decade and didn’t finish a single title on the system. I finally sold it, this year, along with the 11 games I did have for it, and got a whopping 78 bucks off eBay for the package. Mind you, it still had the receipt in the box, showing that I’d paid $80 for the “Doom 64” cartridge I bought at the same time as the system.

On the other hand, the game I came closest to finishing was a $10 game I bought near the end of the system’s life: Perfect Dark.

I actually managed to play all the way to the final boss fight, which I then lost several times in a row before getting entirely too frustrated and giving up on it. So I ALMOST finished one (ONE!) Nintendo 64 game.

It was a hell of a game, though. So, when we added an Xbox 360 to our humble geek apartment, I bought Perfect Dark Zero, the prequel-sequel.

THAT game, I just managed to finish – on the absolute lowest difficulty setting, netting me a whopping 10 points towards my Gamerscore, which now sits at a lofty 920.

It’s a lot easier game than the original, or I’ve developed l33t FPS skillz… let’s go with “it’s a lot easier”, shall we?

It’s also, well, it’s not as epic as the original, but that makes a bit of sense. If they made the prequel game all wowie and zoomie and bang, then Joanna’s reactions to events in the original game wouldn’t make sense. If they’d thrown in, say, aliens, then you would expect her to be all “like, yawn” in the original game instead of “omg! alienz!”

…so to speak.

The designers did go way over the top with the escort missions. I hate escort missions. Perfect Dark Zero has, like, seven missions that involve escorting or defending people. There are 13 levels. This ratio sucks.
At least you’re usually escorting guys with guys who can defend themselves, not random unarmed civilians who run out into the middle of firefights and get themselves shot.

But, even with far too many escort missions, it was some pretty good Dark.

I’ll preface this with: I am a cranky old bastard who doesn’t like the idea of buying games as download versions, because having physical media around makes me feel all secure and comfortable and safe and stuff.

On the other hand, Jeff Minter put out a game on Xbox Live Arcade. This makes me suck it up and deal with the idea of a download-only purchase.

And it (Space Giraffe) is goodness. It is shooty and musicy and all the things one wants from a Minter game. It is also bloody hard and I die a lot after about level 10. This is also kind of as expected from a Minter game.

I had to buy 1600 Microsoft points to buy this 400 Microsoft point game, so I had 1200 Microsoft points left over. I bought Geometry Wars.

Geometry Wars is also goodness. It doesn’t have the Minter touch, but it is also shooty and musicy and very much a “zone” game.

Hmm. Could “Minter” be a genre? You could stick stuff like Geometry Wars, Robotron X, maybe Rez into the “Minter” Genre and they would all go together fairly well.

It fits neatly into the standard game genres between “Fighting” and “Puzzle”. A gap which, I think everyone can agree, needs a little filler.

I still have 800 Microsoft Points to spend. I’m thinking that I’ll probably break down and buy the Street Fighter II HD version when it finally comes out, since I haven’t bought a new Street Fighter II game since the 3D0.