Wednesday, May 28, 2008

World Bore

So this is the first video of Guitar Hero: World Tour in action that I've seen. If you don't know, World Tour is Guitar Hero's blatant ripoff of Rock Band. But now the drums have five pads! Great, now I'll need a second set of plastic drums taking up space.

Besides all that, the worst damn part of this video is the fact that they show the game screen for all of 30 seconds through two songs. After that we get 5 minutes of the players looking incredibly unengaged. Tony Hawk looks especially bored. Show us the game screen! We know what it looks like when people play Guitar Hero.

Thursday, May 22, 2008

Objection!

Heh.

So I finally picked up the second and third games in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series. This was mainly caused by my need to have some new game to play with my DS when I go to Italy at the end of the month. I finished the first one at some point last year and I've always meant to continue with the series, because it really is quite enjoyable. I started Justice For All yesterday and got through the quick introduction case pretty easily. The Phoenix Wright games are, at their heart, a member of a genre you don't see much of these days. They are essentially a series of old school point and click adventure games. The "puzzles" come into play during the trial when you need to figure out the contradictions in a witnesses' testimony and then figure out just what piece of evidence exposes their lie. It's actually quite satisfying, especially once the game stops holding your hand. For some reason, I really enjoyed figuring out that there's no way the victim could've written the murderer's name on the ground with his right hand when he had just been bought a left handed baseball glove. Clearly there was foul play afoot.

I also really enjoy the pure insanity of the legal system in the game. Lawyer's shout at each other, the judge is generally clueless, and witnesses lie constantly with little to no repercussions. I wish real courtrooms were like this. I don't even mind that all the cases essentially follow the same pattern: someone gets murdered, and someone is falsely accused. You, as the defense attorney, will not only prove your client innocent but also figure out who the real murderer is because they just happened to be one of the witnesses that eventually will get called in the trial. Even though the cases grow in complexity this is what is eventually going to happen. If they ever deviate from this formula in some case or other I'll be greatly surprised and delighted.

Whoo.

Tuesday, May 20, 2008

Worth it?

So one of the new Rock Band tracks this week is Hier Kommt Alex by Die Toten Hosen. Some astute Guitar Hero fans will recognize this as one of the bonus songs available in Guitar Hero 3 and pretty much anyone will be able to tell from the title that this isn't a song that originated in an english speaking area. All the lyrics in this song are in German, and I honestly need to consider whether it is worth two dollars just to enjoy myself and others totally failing at singing a song in german.

This YouTube clip shows just how difficult it could be.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

GTA

So here I am again after not posting for almost two months. I'll maybe try to maintain this a bit more now that I'm out of school and looking for approximately anything I can do to stave off the extreme boredom. I just beat a little game you might have heard of called Grand Theft Auto 4. It was pretty damn enjoyable. Is it the best game ever as several hyperbole reviews around the internet have claimed? I dunno about that. But it's certainly an incredibly entertaining and polished game that everyone should play. I don't really feel like regurgitating everything you can read in any review of this game, so I'd rather talk about a couple specific things that really impressed me.
It was, for me, all the little things that made the game what it was. By "the little things" I mean all the little touches that really fleshed out the game world. The fact that you can sit in your apartment and watch two separate TV channels full of potentially hours of entertainment. The fact that you can go to the Cabaret club and see a different act a surprisingly large number of times. Same thing with the comedy club, where they have two real world comedians, the amazing Ricky Gervais and amazingly unfunny Katt Williams, who do multiple five minute sets of comedy. Why would any developer take the time to put such things into a game? I mean there's already 18 radio stations in the game. Hell, there's even a fairly entertaining tetris clone on the arcade machine in the game.
The other things that was really impressive was some of the choices that you have to make near the end of the game. Unfortunately, I don't want to spoil anything so I won't go into any specifics. but the choices you get to make are so far beyond the typical choices in videogames. There is no obvious Good choice or Bad choice. Both sides of the choices have benefits and consequences, and the writing and voice acting really manage to transfer the conflict that Niko feels to the player.
Now to dig some more into the multiplayer. Or get some more achievements.