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Sunday, December 27th, 2009
skankinclams
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10:33p
The only reason I don't want to sell my American PS2 is because the Japanese version of Jak 2 doesn't feature the English voice track.
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(comment on this) Monday, December 28th, 2009
harveyjames
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3:23a
HEY let's play CAPTAIN BLOOD
Hey! I have somehow managed to fall really sick in the last couple of days, to the point where doing anything other than being in bed is pretty much a special kind of hell, so I just decided: I am going use this time to finally play CAPTAIN BLOOD
(Don't be put off by the Schwartzenegger clone in the preload image- watch the video from 1:25 and you'll get some kind of sense of what this game is)
It's a french Atari ST game from like 1988- it's got this unique, desolate atmosphere which has always made me feel compelled to try it out. Like the deep space you travel through, the game is cold, morally blank- the main character's a dying space pilot in a barren, mostly empty galaxy. He's hunting for his five clones so he can take their fluids to prolong his own life. You find these clones by talking to the alien lifeforms you might find hiding on the planets you encounter, and you talk to them in their own language- a pictogrammatically represented series of heiroglyphs the player must decipher and learn as he plays the game. The more you talk to people, the more of this language you learn and the more questions you can ask.
But even once you're able to talk to and understand these creatures, nothing's easy- their motives are often obtuse, their information can be misleading. Apparently, the locations of some of Blood's clones can only be found out from the other clones, so sometimes you're forced to keep them alive- a lot of bartering and skullduggery goes on in this.
As a child this game baffled me! True to its contents, the game seemed completely alien to my young self- the mechanics of the gameplay were foriegn to the point where I never actually discovered any alien lifeforms, I just flew around the galaxy destroying planets before I had a chance to see who lived on them (Captain Blood can do that). According to the youtube user comments, at least one kid in the 80's thought this game was really a link to the onboard computer of an alien craft, and for a dread week thought he had sent a command to destroy the earth. I can completely understand why- It has that kind of air about it.
So hey I am practically an adult now, and there's no other game that's come at all close to offering the same experience, so it's about time I bit the bullet and played it, I reckon. If you're similarly bedridden and you feel like joining in, that would be neato 'cause maybe we can use the comments section of this post to trade hints and tips and whatnot, and not look at walkthroughs, and be 100% top draw dudes and ladies!
Download the game here!
Then, download an Atari ST emulator to play it on- for PC, Linux or Mac
I'm not 100% sure how to get the game to run, I will be going into this thing pretty blind myself but if you have trouble, ask for help in the comments maybe!
wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Blood_(video_game)
If you're in type 'I'm in' in the comments. OK LET'S KILL SOME FUCKIN' EVIL CLONES
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(10 comments | comment on this) Sunday, December 27th, 2009
tablesaw
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5:29p
Beat Tablesaw's Family Again!
Woo. It's been a busy few days, and it still is. Shopping and parties and work work work—I won't really get a chance to relax until Tuesday, when my New Year's break starts (five-day weekend!).
The executive summary of gifts received is: lots of nice clothes, two fantastick backpacks, and an Xbox 360 for ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) ojouchan and I from my nuclear family.
As I mentioned earlier, I ran a trivia game based on Wits and Wagers. If you've never played it, I describe it as a combination of Balderdash, The Price Is Right, and Vegas betting. Everyone gets asked a trivia question with a number for an answer. Your goal is to be the closest without going over. Everybody turns in their answers, and they're lined up in order on the betting board. Odds are assigned according to the order of guesses, and you get to bet on which one was the closest without going over.
So, in the poll below, I've reproduced the questions, my family's guesses, and the odds that were assigned to them. Your job is to see if you can be better bettors than they were.
For each question you can pick either one or two guesses. If you check two boxes, you'll split your bet, placing one "chip" on each, and receiving the basic return if that bet is right (if the odds say 3:1, you'll get 3 points). If you check only one box, you double your bet on one option, and the rewards are doubled as well if you're right (if the odds say 3:1, you'll get 6 points).
Obviously, no internet research is allowed. Also, the poll is set to display everyone's guesses once you've entered yours, but try not to let it effect your responses.
When my family played, the best team got 28 points from betting. Can you do better?
This journal has moved to Dreamwidth. Entry originally posted at http://tablesaw.dreamwidth.org/435920.html.
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ferricide
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1:58p
eff eff thirteen
here's my demand for you. i'm 8.5 hrs into FF13, but i want to talk about it anyway. your job is to remember that i'm 8.5 hrs into it and forgive that.
it's odd. on one hand the preview is an established and necessary form of enthusiast games journalism. on the other hand, would you write about a film, or a book, or a novel, before completing it? maybe some preliminary thoughts. EW does film previews based on apparently very little, if the text is to be judged. yet... it feels weird and incomplete and uncomfortable for me to do it now. no matter how many times i did it before.
Final Fantasy XIII is too monumental. to me personally, to the industry, to the archipelago nation of japan. it represents something. the fruition of a cinematic technique for gameplay design that was deeply influential but is losing sway, needs to justify its existence.
FF13 is going to be a polarizing game. and a lot of people will be very loud about how incomprehensible or badly bad or loud and empty it is. from now until march and beyond. or maybe i'm the only person who gives a shit who works outside of shinjuku. who knows?
anyway, it's tough to write about. but...
let's try.
final fantasy XIII
final fantasy XIII is an RPG by square enix for the playstation 3 computer entertainment system. it was released in japan december 17, 2009. the worldwide release is scheduled for march.
the game features command input battles utilizing, in a wisp of its essence, the ATB battle system introduced by final fantasy IV in 1991. the game features exploration, and cinematics, and dialogue. the game features fireworks and armies and nonlinear narrative and linear gameplay. it is, nominally, an RPG.
"RPG". i just dug into this with parish and kat and travis a little but on the ATB podcast, but FF13 is not an RPG that allows for even a smidgen of role playing. if you play a role, it's the Sky Auditor, making sure that the movements of the little people on the ground are directed according to as proper a formulation as you can execute at all times.
though i am going to avoid talking too much about the counterarguments against the game's design, a little hay has been made that the game is simply one long corridor you run down. i can split hairs, but the game is almost literally linear. the question that is not being asked is: is this a good thing? it's being so far assumed that it is not.
i don't mind. i kind of like it. give me a goal and i'm a cheerful button presser and stick waggler.
the JRPG genre has long been in thrall to linearity. the games are generally rather story-driven and also quite determined to present a crafted worldview and cast of set characters for interaction. on a strucutral level, they are often a system of locks and gates; while you can go from town to dungeon and dungeon to town as much as you like, there's only ever really one right thing to do.
that's because there is a goal in the form known lately as JRPG: that goal is to move forward in space and in time, and to trigger the next cutscene. in a bad game with good cutscenes (cosmic fantasy 2) this could not be more apparent. in a good game with bad cutscenes (star ocean 4) it's just as apparent in the inverse.
in a good game, you advance the plot and you enjoy the core gameplay simultaneously, but they have a fundamental disconnection. that disconnection has been getting greater and greater as games get more advanced and thicker and fatter in their storytelling.
at the budgetary level of FF13, the amount of creative energy expended on both of these aspects, the storytelling and the gameplay, is exceptionally high. i'm not sure if it's a mere consequence that an exceptional linearity is the result. it's more likely that it's a purely conscious design choice on the part of the team.
FF13 has no towns. many are surprised by this. i'm not particularly so. i was actually kind of hoping it wouldn't. in short, i kinda called it.
it was over eight hours into my play session before i could walk up to someone and push the X button to talk to them. the decision to experience dialogue, to that point, had been purely noninteractive (either ambient or cinematic.) can you imagine that in a JRPG?
the impetus
anybody who reads my blog knows that i'm a big fan of crisis core. that game, being a streamlined thing designed for the PSP -- and quite unlike the game it's a prequel to -- follows a mission structure. you deploy from a hub (shinra HQ) into external environments (dungeons).
in my opinion, it cut a lot of the fat from JRPGs. not all of it -- there are still some tedious segments where you run around talking to people and trying to force what happens next to happen soon. but generally it's a good structure for a game. and they added shopping (for potions etc) to the main menu, so you don't need to go out to town to resupply.
well, FF13 took it a step further. the game is paced and structured more like devil may cry than an RPG. you explore its world, which is generally laid out before you as an easy march, and periodically you'll run into the story.
i think people who aren't happy were hoping that the game would keep the form of towndungeontown and just make the towns interesting. the shocking conclusion the team reached was "why not just cut the fucking towns?" you're not getting half a game: you're getting a hibachi steak that's already had the fat trimmed and has been cut into small and succulent chunks for simple consumption.
i think that people expect artifice to be hidden in games. i think people have recently been looking for some sense of "reality". take call of duty, which despite being the most popular thing going, often gets knocks for being linear and design-heavy. the designers employ tricks (like grenades that spawn out of nowhere) to keep you on the path, rather than just physically hemming you in. the designers employ tripwires that dump out the next cutscene... but they don't mark them on the minimap, like FF13 does. (make sure you save first!) FF13 is designed to be easily grasped and, with its tremendously high number of save points, consumed once, consumed in order, and consumed safely and in the dosage you require.
i think there's another piece of the unspoken RPG covenant that FF13's designers stepped back and thought and said "no" to. usually with RPGs, the game hands you a great deal of its core gameplay and says "make of this what you will." this gives rise to quite boring infodumpy tutorials. they are usually far too early into the game to make any sense. the throttle on this gameplay freedom is usually just the leveling system -- you have access to an extremely limited subset of everything you will get access to. JRPGs usually take this a step further and wait until Act II to dump the crafting (or whatever) system on you, but that's about it on the paradigm shifting front.
FF13's design team is like, "no, we're going to dripfeed you a new aspect of the gameplay system every so often as we choose. not you choose -- no, we choose." everything is paced manually. it's crazy! you'll beat a boss and be handed something new. not because you earned it through accumulation of points; nothing so arbitrary or gameable. the designers have decided: this is when they'll be ready.
there are two obvious benefits to this: one is that i understand all of the gameplay in FF13 because i learned it in sequence and at intervals. this is in stark contrast to a lot of RPGs where i see a tutorial at hour 2 and then forget how to do any of the gameplay by the time the battles actually get hard at hour 6 or 8. it is also a good hook into continuously being interested in the gameplay: something new will unlock and keep me interested.
that said, the control can be a little excessive. the artifice does shine. i think the tension for people with this game boil down to: how much control are they willing to give up?
uncontrol
i replayed the first chunk of FF7 earlier this year, because of crisis core (primarily). i wanted to see where that had all come from originally, since it had largely passed out of memory. that game was somewhat notorious in its time for trapping you in midgar for the first 7-or-so hours.
i get the sense from what i've read, which is not very much, that FF13 traps you on its line for about 20 or 25 -- not having gotten that far i can't say -- before something changes. i think people are going to have a hard time with that. if you think GTA or oblivion is the thing, then this is not the thing.
i think that some developers are good at specific things and others at others, and that trend-chasing is to be avoided. i mean, that extends beyond developers into films and other art. play to your strengths. in that sense i think FF13 is the right game for this team. but there's obviously also a need to play to the tastes of your audience. particularly when you factor in a budget like this. in that sense i think FF13 is something of a gamble.
more
there's a lot more to talk about, though. the characters and story, for example. here i feel very impeded by wanting to see the shape of the whole before discussing its parts, and also by the language barrier. when people talk i get between 0 to 100% of what they are saying. i would guess that on overall dialogue comprehension i'm hovering somewhere around 60% and overall story comprehension (remember, it's highly visual, and i have no small amount of practice dealing with this stuff) i'm probably around 85%.
of course, since a story in FF is designed to be complicated and twisty, it's hard to even know what i am meant to not yet understand and what i simply don't understand through my own fault.
that said, the story has its hooks in me. there's a reasonably elegant framing device that's being used repeatedly. as tim rogers said in his kotaku piece, you keep thinking you know what the story is about and the story keeps showing you a new facet to show you that, in fact, you don't know what it is about. that is an effective structure for a game.
i think what's worth discussing is its pacing. as you traverse the dungeons you get short but frequent cutscenes. this is an intelligent refinement of the long dungeon, long cutscene paradigm. they're rarely so frequent they feel like interruptions. it's more evidence of the careful massaging this game has been through. years of development that i assumed was more related to the difficulties of creating a next generation engine were also spent in some large proportion on polish. i am left somehow surprised. that's where the relief comes from.
lightning, hope, sazh, vanille, snow, fang. i guess all i really have to say about the characters is that is the order i put them in without thinking about it, so that's a relevance pecking order dumped from my brain directly, without thought, at 8.5 hours.
and that's where i'll leave you. i've gone as far as i can with this right now. time to give randy some attention instead.
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(9 comments | comment on this)
roushimsx
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3:39p
About time for end of year stats
Year is closing down quick and I doubt I'm going to beat any more games :(
Right now I'm clearing my backlog of scanning stuff, but after about another 100 pages I'll totally do my writeup. Well, after I scan 100 pages and play some more Assassin's Creed II, which is really quite fun so far (though I have no idea if it will stay that way or nosedive like the first one did).
I finished Deus Ex: Invisible War last night, clocking in something like 8 1/2 hours, though I believe there was another hour or two there not counted from dying/reloading/experimenting. Started off weak, ended weak, had some neat stuff throughout the middle. The interface for the game never really got tolerable and I'm still struggling to understand why they made some of the decisions that they did (especially with regard to the inability to holster a weapon, the way you manage your inventory, biomod selection/deselection, etc).
They simplified the RPG elements to make it more accessible, bringing it closer to an action/adventure...but the levels were so constricted and small that it totally negated the adventure element. The game didn't work well with an action-centric focus either, so the only thing it really had going for it was the ability to accomplish missions in a number of different ways.
If you're a fan of Deus Ex, I'd recommend against checking the game out. It's not that it's outright bad, it's just that it's a major step down in pretty much every way short of the graphics (I really do not like how they handled the Templars in the story, btw). It's not really a good introduction to the series, but I guess if you have zero intention of ever playing the first game and you're interested in checking out an FPS that does it all a little different, maybe you'll dig it. Personally, I think Project Snowblind was a much better attempt at taking Deus Ex and turning it into an action game.
Oh, and that Steam sale? It's killing my wallet, bro :(
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skankinclams
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12:03a
Suzuka
Suzuka has been compared to other manga such as Love Hina,[6] Maison Ikkoku,[15][16] and Kimagure Orange Road[17] since, early on, it used similar plot structure and plot devices. These comparisons became less frequent as the story developed. According to Kouji Seo, Suzuka was to be a romance story from the beginning, and he had no intention of creating a harem manga.[18] Since the North American version is uncensored, this caused the manga to be rated "Mature" and sold in shrink wrap.[19] Despite the amount of fan service, the manga does not focus on that element.[16] Kouji Seo pays attention to detail which can be seen in the clothing that gives off the sensation they are made out of different material along with the reflections in the windows during the nighttime.[20] This detail can also be seen in his characters as they all have complex personalities that make them interesting and have substance.[21] Overall the reception of the manga has been positive.
God fuck you anime people that write wikipedia entries. I'm actually reading the manga now, when I use the bathroom. It's almost not retarded.
I also see that Livejournal is finally getting "who visits your journal" feature. Welcome to 2006 Livejournal.
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(comment on this) Saturday, December 26th, 2009
ferricide
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2:20p
randyland
made it to grand rapids without incident. weather at o'hare was not that bad. my flight had to be very slightly delayed for deicing (snow began to fall about an hour before its departure) and also because they started spacing out the takeoffs for safety. but it was not a big deal. at all. i made it here just slightly late.
we had a very lovely christmas present exchange (there's a major present coming on monday too it seems) and we watched a bunch of dr. katz episodes (my main present to randy was the dr. katz box set.) i adore that show. falling asleep with your bf while dr. katz is on, on christmas = nice.
we got to play with randy's landlords' cats, because he's taking care of them while they are out of town. we also had chinese for lunch. REAL EGG ROLL. <3 food is so ridiculously cheap here. and we're going to see avatar tonight in imax 3D. hooray.
now: who knows what! the afternoon is wide open.
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(1 comment | comment on this)
kiken
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2:28p
Obligatory Christmas haul post
A Sonic The Hedgehog hoodie
A Sonic plush
The expansion deck for Power Grid (makes the game not broken... not pictured)
The Flash DVD set
MST3K vol XV DVD set
Three Amigos DVD
Quantom of Solace DVD
Disney's Fireball DVD set (<3 Drossel!)
A Rockman t-shirt
2 packets of shortbread biscuits
Analysis of the Tangut Script (this book is older than I am!)
Portabello Market (boardgame)
Owl City: Ocean Eyes CD
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(comment on this)
fishie_flop_oog
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2:02p
Sexy Beast
To celebrate managing to not clutter up the flist of those who follow me(my last LJ post was 31 weeks ago) I shall post a picture of me.
The beard is gone in a few hours.
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(comment on this) Friday, December 25th, 2009
(comment on this)
(comment on this)
ferricide
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12:57a
wow, it's christmas
i think this is the first christmas eve i've spent in san francsico and only the second in california (it's my 9th since i moved here in 2000.) usually, i'm already home by now or at least arriving this evening. but this year i am not going to visit my parents. i am going to visit my ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) lostncove. and since we're not religious, and today was not a free day off in gamasutra-land, i stayed home and am flying out tomorrow (wish, pray, or hope for me -- weather conditions in chicago look a fright.)
tonight, instead of flying to pennsylvania, i had a nice time hanging out with the convalescent franken_bear and his hubby 50poundnote, sftekbear and blakes_7. we ate snacks and chatted under the warm glow of christmas lights. that's how i like my christmas eve -- low key and chatty.
adult life. i really feel like 2009 is the year of my adult life really beginning. it's peculiar to be coming at it so late, but as i've said before, i think it's also kind of typical these days, or at least in my circle of friends and acquaintances.
whew. all packed and ready to go tomorrow AM. i'm so excited.
and i'm 8.5 hrs into final fantasy XIII. i think i might try to bang something about it out on the plane or during my layover tomorrow, but right now i just don't have the energy. i'm all squirrely with anticipation of what's going on tomorrow as well.
whoever and wherever you are, merry christmas.
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