Attack of the Games from Western Developers.

Posted on April 22, 2007 by baudattitude

For a bit of a change of pace after ICO, I decided to put Justice League Heroes in the Xbox and give it a try.

I have to give Snowblind Studios a hearty thumbs up for their accomplishment. I really expected to be annoyed with the game – how on earth do you properly balance a game where you can play the same level as, say, Superman OR Zatanna? – but after actually playing it I managed to put the fanboy geekery aside and just enjoy it. I was also quite impressed that they pushed the Xbox hardware a little bit and gave us a game that supported 720p and 16:9 wide-screen – with the Xbox “dead”, I would have expected shovelware at best.

It’s a sin that the thing is already discounted to 20 bucks – it’s a real bargain. I’m glad they decided to put Hal in as an unlockable character, because without that I never would have picked up the game and I’d have missed out on a good bit of fun.

I did run into a couple of glitches. In one of the final “rescue all the civilian” missions, I managed to find all the civilians, but one of them wouldn’t go into “rescued” mode, so I never got credit for completing that objective. I was able to complete the level, anyway, but it worried me. Also, the end credits are in 4:3 aspect ratio, but my TV (and, I think, most HDTVs) don’t support 4:3 images in 720p – they get stretched to fill a 16:9 window.

Those were not nearly so annoying as the glitches I’m finding in today’s game. Ranty bit ahead.

One of the reasons my wife decided we needed an Xbox in the first place was the Buffy the Vampire Slayer game. Yes, my wife decided we needed an Xbox. She’s actually the motivating factor behind a lot of the cool electronics that come into our apartment. To answer the next question from all the guys out there … no, she doesn’t have a sister.

Anyway. So, she’d heard that the Buffy game was really cool, so we bought an Xbox – this would be 4 years ago? Whenever the game was released – and until now we haven’t actually sat down and played it. She’d gotten through the training mission by herself but had not progressed far into the actual game, and I’d never picked it up.

After I finished Justice League Heroes, she picked it off the games shelf and handed it to me, and I realized something. It’s an Electronic Arts game. I don’t usually let them into our apartment. I’ve been boycotting EA since the mid 80s when they dropped support for the Atari home computers in favor of the Commodore line and they haven’t done anything in the interim to make me any more fond of them. I could go extra ranty here, but I will spare you all. At any rate, it snuck into our house without me noticing. At least I have the defense that the case doesn’t have their logo on it, just a subtle bit of text on the back. Also, the manual is printed in ink made out of babies and kittens. I should have noticed that.

It’s actually a pretty enjoyable game, mostly because the writing is sharp and they got almost the entire cast of the TV series on to do the voice work.

Unfortunately it’s a bit buggy in spots.

I’ve had the voice and sound effects cut completely out at the start of a cutscene and then be gone from that point until I rebooted the machine, and I’ve had a rescued vampire victim walk into a door, get stuck in a door, and then not be able to move, which meant I couldn’t get through the door, couldn’t progress any further in the level, and had to suicide to start over.

I am running on a 360 in backwards compatibility mode, but it’s much easier to blindly hate on EA than it is to acknowledge that some of the glitches might be related to running it on the 360. So, bastards at EA, I hate you again.

Rant over.

This makes two in a row from American developers, and if we stretch it to “Western” developers I’ve also put Beyond Good and Evil and Tomb Raider Legend through their paces lately. Very unusual considering how Japan-biased our games collection is.

Posted in videogames, xbox | Leave a comment

Online classes am hard!

Posted on April 22, 2007 by baudattitude

It’s 3 weeks into the term and I feel like I may finally have my feet under me with my online courses.

I went all-online this term because my former employer told me that I would have to do some overseas travel for them and as a result I couldn’t take conventional courses.  Then they laid me off the Friday before the new term started, but I’ve stuck with the online courses anyway – trying to get into anything useful at the last minute would have been impossible, and online courses don’t interfere with my job hunt.

So – English Literature 104 and Technical Writing 227.  It’s a good thing that English Lit is pretty easy, because Technical Writing is a bear – the material is mostly stuff that I’ve picked up over the years anyway, but now I’m learning that there are names for things and that most of the techniques I’ve learned on-the-fly are techniques that have been known for absolutely ages… so I’m getting decent grades thus far, but I have trouble thinking in “correct language”  – I want to say “tricking the boss into thinking that the decision you wanted is one he’s making on his own” and my textbook wants to call that “Reader-oriented persuasion.”

As for literature class, I think that my classmates should be banned from using adjectives, particularly “beautiful”, “moving”, “touching” and anything of the ilk.  From reading the classroom discussion, some of these prats would burst into tears from reading the side of a cereal box.  I’m getting good marks in this course as well, so I think I’m successfully masking my natural cynicism.

This morning’s weight, 192.4, and my 36 waist jeans are comfortable enough that I think I could try on some 34s without too much risk.  I won’t go buying any right now, since it’s not like the 36s are falling off me or anything, but considering I started out at a 44 waist it’s a hell of a nice thing to be thinking.

Posted in school, weight | Leave a comment

I-co, I-co, un-day

Posted on April 20, 2007 by baudattitude

ICO joins the list of games I ought to have played ages ago and am only now seeing why everyone was mad about them.

Short, charming, and only slightly maddening – platform style jumping with the PS2 analog stick is something I’ve not had occasion to learn how to do before, and the bit of the game that got lifted straight out of Castle of Cagliostro was bloody nasty hard as a result.

I’m looking forward to Shadow of the Colossus now. That doesn’t mean it’s next off the stack, of course, we’ll see what happens.

Game mechanics-wise, it’s an interesting process going from Tomb Raider Legend to Beyond Good and Evil to ICO. They’re honestly all find-the-switch-pull-the-box kind of games, just trussed up with different stories and styles, but they differ wildly in how much the designers took the seatbelts off – it’s really very difficult to fall to your death in BG&E, for instance, but it’s the normal course of affairs in ICO, and Tomb Raider is more of a “you CAN die here, but we’re going to give you lots of chances to save yourself” game.

Posted in PS2, videogames | Leave a comment

Job Hunt 2007 update

Posted on April 20, 2007 by baudattitude

After bitching about how submitting resumes via Craiglist felt like throwing them into a bloody black hole, I was pretty surprised when sending out 3 applications today resulted in 2 personal – not canned! – email responses.

Granted, neither was “get down here for an interview!  we need you!” but both were at least cordial We-Got-Your-Resume-Thanks emails.

I choose to look at this as a positive sign.

Posted in work | Leave a comment

Bargain gaming…

Posted on April 20, 2007 by baudattitude

When I was sorting out papers recently, I stumbled across a receipt from 1995 for Solar Eclipse.

This was a fairly forgettable Saturn shooter, with the caveat that Claudia Christian did some acting work in the cut-scenes. Since I was hooked on Babylon 5 at the time, it makes sense that I had to have it… but apparently I dropped $59.95 + CA sales tax of 8.25% on it.

By way of contrast, I went to the localish ebgames yesterday and bought four games (yes, I know, I shouldn’t be buying games as I’m theoretically trying to finish them) : Justice League Heroes, Prince of Persia The Sands of Time (and The Warrior Within), and Viewtiful Joe. I’ve heard really good things about the Prince of Persia games and Joe, and, well, Hal Jordan is an unlockable character in JLH so I had to own that, right?

At any rate, 3 highly rated games and one that I’ve heard at least good words on, and it set me back all of…

31 bucks.

There are advantages to being a little behind the curve!

I think there are still a few games from this last generation that are “must play!” titles, and with my profound lack of willpower and attraction to shiny objects I’ll probably wind up owning them… but I’ll be spending a heck of a lot less than on Solar Eclipse. 🙂

Posted in gamecube, Saturn, videogames, xbox | Leave a comment

Points to the French…

Posted on April 18, 2007 by baudattitude

For making a fine game.

I speak of course of Beyond Good and Evil, which seems to be one of the top games on anyone’s “If you haven’t played xxx you’re not a real yyy” list.

Not that I’m, you know, succumbing to peer pressure and following the crowd and all that. Because I totally am. Sometimes, the crowd is right.

When I say “the crowd” of course I mean a fairly small crowd. After all, this thing was released and marked down to 20 bucks within the first month. It’s no platinum selling system mover must have title.

This one was only on my shelf for three years or so, played up to the first save point and abandoned. I think I put it in the Xbox when we had some friends over and realized very quickly that (a) it wasn’t really a play-with-others game and (b) the pig was annoying.

3 years later, the pig is still annoying. That aside…

The game itself is a very enjoyable hybrid. You’ve got your Zelda-inspired combat, your stealthy bits, a little bit of hovercraft racing, you’ve got some collecting of items to do and you’ve got an oddly addictive secondary goal of keeping up a photographer job while you try to save the world. How Peter Parkeresque. Should I admit that I died in one of the early boss fights because I was trying to get a picture of the boss in order to get paid for it?

The game is also forklift-free, which is important to me. You do bump some boxes around with a hovercraft, but no forks are used in the lifting of any crates.
Well worth the twenty bucks, or whatever it costs now.

After letting those credits scroll and being fairly surprised by the last little plot twist, I dove, maybe a little quickly, into ICO for the PS2. So far I’m loving the atmosphere and hating the camera angles. I’ve played up through the bit with the windmill and it’s driven me to look things up online twice already, which is something I do only when it comes down to that or I put a controller through the window. You may infer from that that it’s a little frustrating.

In other news, I continue to count down to a “healthy” BMI, clocking in at 193.6 this morning. That’s 13 pounds since March 3rd… I should be at goal by mid-May if this keeps up.

Posted in videogames, weight, xbox | Leave a comment

If you can’t beat them, set difficulty to “Monkey”

Posted on April 16, 2007 by baudattitude

Ages and ages ago, when the SegaCD was Welcoming People to the Next Level and all that good stuff, a very peculiar game managed to slip by the “make it as American as possible!” localization people, and we got Keio Yuugekitai (Keio Flying Squadron, in the US).

I’m no good at shooters, mind you, but this game had enough weirdness about it to make up for me being dreadful. It featured a bunny-girl-outfit-wearing shrine maiden and her pet dragon fighting against a fearsome tanuki army. If you’re my kind of people, you really don’t need anything more than that to understand why it was a glorious thing.

But it was a shooter, and therefore I managed to see about 3 levels of it.

In 1996, the Japanese got a sequel of sorts : Keio Yuugekitai Katsugekihen, which kept the bunny-girl and the tanuki and mostly lost the shooter aspect. There are a few shooter stages, and a very odd roller coaster stage, but mostly it’s a platform game. I can sometimes beat platform games, so this was more my speed. Walk to the left and right, go up ladders, jump on things to defeat them… or get a giant pink mallet and smack them about more directly. Again, if you’re my kind of people, any game where you wield a giant pink mallet should have you a little misty in the eyes.

I didn’t get a copy when it was new, of course, mostly because it was never in stock at any of the import game stores in LA. It wasn’t until 2002 or so that I scored a copy off eBay, and it was pretty shortly after that that I abandoned it after never getting much past the first boss.

Just because I CAN sometimes beat platform games doesn’t mean I can do it if there’s any challenge.

I booted it up again today, with the benefit of a few more years of off-and-on Japanese learning, and took a peek in the Option screen.

The first thing I noticed was that I could set it to auto-save when I finished levels, so I could put it aside and continue later. This isn’t on by default.

The second thing I realized is that I could understand the difficulty settings now. It was set at “hito” (person)

The other options were “saru” and “tengu”, or “monkey” and “crow demon”

I decided I was a monkey.

Thus began a few happy hours of tanuki slaughter, culminating in one of the oddest boss fights I expect to ever experience, and me happily watching the ending cinematic having used up every continue and all but one extra life.

Call me a gimp if you must, but I am one happy monkey.

Posted in Saturn, videogames | Leave a comment

Linda, Linda…

Posted on April 16, 2007 by baudattitude

OK, more like Lara, Lara. All apologies to the Blue Hearts.

Keeping up to date, today’s weight check : 194.4.

My recruiter seems to have found a couple of decent leads to throw a resume at and hope it sticks, and I’m of course sending off all manner of resumes myself, but while I remain out of work the game consoles continue to get a workout.

After Panzer Dragoon Saga, I went through the Saturn shelf a little more, and came up with Tomb Raider, possibly the most popular series nobody believes launched on the Saturn.

I’ve never finished it. I got quite far – looking at the level list on Wikipedia, I think I was about 3 levels from the end when I ran into a boss fight that I just couldn’t seem to beat. All things considered, it seemed like a pretty good choice.

But, one of the flaws with the console versions was the frequent deaths and very infrequent save points, and I don’t know if I’ve the tolerance for that anymore.

Anyway, I own the PC version, something I got in one of those “Mega Hits” collections, and I knew that had save-anywhere functionality, so I put the Saturn version aside and tried to install that. Not so much the worky. A little digging online revealed that, while it can be made to work under Windows XP, or even Vista, it takes a degree of mucking about that I wasn’t willing to do, and even if you got it running it didn’t have as good of music as the console versions. Shameful.

And… apparently they’re doing a remake of the first game ANYWAY, for the 10th 11th anniversary, and it will be a budget title, so why not wait for that?

Instead, I jumped forward two generations and picked Tomb Raider Legend off the shelf.

I played most of Tomb Raider, as I mentioned, and I played enough of Tomb Raider II on the Playstation to get to the point where running out of flares got annoying (very early), but I’d missed III, Chronicles, Angel of Darkness, whatever else was released thereafter. Comments I have heard over the years have indicated that I didn’t miss much.

Tomb Raider Legend, however, I heard good things about, so when we bought our XBox 360, it was one of the four games we picked up with it – Dead Rising, Ridge Racer 6, and Dead of Alive Extreme Beach Volleyball 2 were the others, and one of these days I will actually give them some playtime.

It was rather a different game than 1996’s game. Much more shooty, for one. Far fewer animal enemies, and especially NO UNDERWATER ENEMIES. I confess that I have a serious case of the heebie jeebies that comes from fighting stuff underwater – this was a big problem back when I was playing the first game… all those crocodiles, brrr.

I think I can leave aside the oohing and aahing at graphics, etc. It’s a 360 game and in hi-def and stuff, yes, it looks good. I got a kick out of a bit where, just after I’ve finished going “wow!” at a particularly neat bit of scenery, Lara makes a crack about going into the postcard business.

Most of the time I died due to falling off things, and most of those were due to me being a bit of a klutz when it comes to playing 3rd person games. I did die an awful lot, though, and in the Nepal level it managed to get just a bit frustrating, but never enough to make me toss the controller and give up. This represents a difficulty level that anyone who’s actually good at these sorts of games will probably consider childishly easy, but for me, I was happy to be able to see the whole story.

Another one down. 🙂 With 12 years worth of games to choose from, what comes off the to-play pile next is anyone’s guess.

This needed a PS: The game includes forklift content. Apparently I’m doomed to forklifts. I’m 6 hours into Beyond Good and Evil now without a forklift in sight but I have no faith in that.

Posted in Saturn, videogames, weight, work, Xbox 360 | Leave a comment

Vague and pointless ranting.

Posted on April 13, 2007 by baudattitude

When you’re trying to keep a log of your job applications so you can have it handy in case the Oregon Employment department ever asks you to prove you’ve been looking for work, anonymous craigslist job postings make keeping said log a genuine pain in the ass.
Maybe I’m just easily annoyed. Actually, that’s kind of a given, I AM easily annoyed. I just hope that if I ever do get asked, the person asking will understand the concept of “I’m throwing resumes into a black hole. I don’t know where they go but I hope that someone on the other side of the black hole replies.”

Oh, and 195.6 this morning, two days in a row actually. Progress!  Slow progress, but progress.

Posted in weight, work | Leave a comment

“Buffalo” is a funny word.

Posted on April 13, 2007 by baudattitude

It’s actually kind of nice sometimes to find out something that hasn’t been working and has been annoying you isn’t your fault.

That’s the feeling I got recently when I found out that the issue I have with the wireless connection on our Mac mini cutting out sometimes isn’t my fault, and it’s not my router, it’s just that very early Intel-based minis have problems with their Airport cards.

I bought my Intel-based mini in the first week of their availability, so it’s one of the problem units.

This really started bugging me recently since I’ve had this time on my hands – you see, I didn’t want to drop the hundred bucks on the XBox 360 wireless adapter, so I configured the internet sharing on the Mac mini and was routing the XBox through the Mac mini over its wireless to my router and then out to XBox Live.

This works great! Until the Airport cuts out again. And all my Xbox downloads abort. And I scream in… ok, I kind of say “damnit!” fairly quietly to myself. No screaming in agony here.

So, how do we solve problems? We throw money at them.

At least this one wasn’t too expensive to solve. I moused around a bit, found some recommendations for the Buffalo WLI-TX4-G54HP “Wireless-G MIMO Performance Ethernet Converter”, looked it up on a couple of retailer web sites, found that Circuit City carries the thing and that the nearby store had one in stock, ran out and dropped 80 bucks on one, with a spiffy rebate coupon that may or may not ever result in 20 bucks back. I’m SO not holding my breath.

Plug it in, hook up the laptop, configure the laptop as 1.1.1.2, open a web browser to 1.1.1.1, and I’m in the configuration software for the thing. It’s so advanced it’s even gone out and automatically hooked in to one of my neighbors’ wireless networks. Handy! But… not very friendly.

So… I tell my wireless router about its MAC address, and give the Buffalo thing my SSID and WPA key, and it’s talking to me. Tell it to get its IP address over DHCP, disconnect the laptop, plug in the Xbox 360 and the Mac mini, and they both just work. Not much more I could ask for in a product.

I’m a little worried that I’m actually starting to be able to type in a fair amount of a 35-character WPA key from memory.

The problem I created, well, now the 360 is on the same network as everything else, so I tried to get its Media Center Extender mojo on with the copy of Windows Media Player 11 running on my main machine, and the two seem to connect but that’s as far as it goes – I can’t see any music in the PC’s library, and while I can see photo filenames I can’t actually display any of the images.

Will I try to solve this? Will I somehow manage to destroy my media library again? Who knows…

But at least I now have a new box with blinking lights on it that solves a problem.

Oh, and Circuit City was restocking since I got there at about 20 minutes to close, and I managed to score a nunchuck attachment for our second wiimote. Yay for late night shopping!

Posted in gadgets, mac, videogames | Leave a comment