2 Months Later

Well it's been an eventful summer. I went to Italy for a month, that was fun. But that's not what I'm here to write about. Here come some random musings of the last month or so.
I've been playing a hell of a lot Rock Band, or more specifically, the Best of The Who pack for Rock because it is totally amazing. Baba O'reilly is my favorite track in a music game ever. I've yet to find an instrument part in a song that was not fun to play. And the drums are incredible and ridiculous because they are all (with the exception of one song) Keith Moon drum parts. That man was crazy.
Thinking about drums reminds me of the second best news that came out of the fairly disappointing E3 2008. (And no, this isn't about Wii Music's ridiculous drum thing.) Rock Band's drums are totally going to work in Guitar Hero: World Tour. This single announcement pretty flipped me from not intending to buy GH at all to now somewhat anticipating it. This was such a shocking announcement from Activision considering some of their actions regarding guitar compatibility between GH3 and Rock Band. At one point, Activision actually blocked Harmonix from releasing a patch that would let the PS3 version of Rock Band use the Guitar Hero 3 guitar. God forbid something they sell become more useful. But all that has changed in this shiny new era of everyone's instruments and games being friendly to each other. Yay.
Now I said that was the second best news. The best thing was the only truly surprising thing announced at E3, Final Fantasy XIII coming to 360. This announcement has removed any need for me to buy a Playstation 3 anytime. FFXIII and MGS4 were really the only games I felt I had to play that were exclusive to PS3 and thankfully I got to play MGS4 anyway when I borrowed my brother's PS3 for the weekend. So yeah, that saves me $400.
And to wrap up, Geometry Wars 2 just came out today. And it's really really fun even though I totally suck at it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nostalgia Alert

So I was thinking earlier about a game that I played a lot of back in the day, Tribes 2, a multiplayer fps that was released in 2001. In my opinion it was way ahead of it's time. It had a wide array vehicles and classes, but by far the best part was that every player had a jet pack. The freedom of movement and tactical options provided by the jetpacks made for a very entertaining experience. It also allowed the level designs to be fairly unique. Maps in Tribes take place in large outdoor landscapes with various bases and facilities scattered over the map. But, since everyone can fly for short periods, the bases and terrain can be vertically oriented with large mountains and multileveled bases that ignore such annoyances as stairs.
I could probably write a lot more about this, but I don't think I can do the experience justice. All I know is that I played this game all the time for more than a year and enjoyed every minute of it. I really wish I hadn't misplaced my CD, because I would love to reinstall it and see if there's anyone still playing. It's a shame the developer, Dynamix, was closed rather soon after it's release by those bastards at Sierra.
A third tribes game did come out, Tribes: Vengeance, but it just couldn't recapture the magic of the second one. The only hope now is Fallen Empires: Legion, a new game from GarageGames (founded by several former members of Dynamix), that is looking very Tribes-like. This interview makes it sound somewhat promising.

Backseat Gamer?

So while watching my brother play through Devil May Cry 4 I was faced with a recurring dilemma. How much assistance/advice do I provide him with as he occasionally struggles with parts of the game? This problem really comes up for me anytime I watch someone play a game that I've played before them. I think it really depends on the person. Over the years, me and my brother have watched each other play through a large number of games. Our understanding has generally been that we give liberal amounts of hints/tips to make each other's gaming experience smoother. I've steered him through many a game over the years and he's done the same for me. I think this understanding might derive from us often effectively co-oping our way through single player games in our younger years. We're used to and okay with helping each other.
For other people, hints are less appreciated in most cases. The most extreme case that I've experienced so far is from my roommate, who apparently hates any commentary on his playing of a game at all. This has made it tough for me at points to watch him play stuff. Nonetheless, I have to respect his wishes to solve a game totally on his own.
A subset of the giving advice aspect of games, is giving advice that is totally wrong. It is surprisingly entertaining to get an unexpected victim to catapult themselves off a level in order to get a secret item or holding down extra buttons to get a "buff". To get this to work you really need to be known as having very good and reliable videogame knowledge. Thankfully, I easily meet this qualification.