I think by now it’s safe to assume that I’m a geek. I built my own website for both an online comic and a blog, talk mostly about video games, and have made jokes and references to Dungeons & Dragons and anime. However, there are sometimes where I even surprise myself, as I turn a simple thought that brings a smirk to mind into something completely ridiculous. Nonetheless, I have no doubt that there would be interest in a web application that combines your Gamerscore with D&D statistics.

The idea came about the other day when I was exploring the dashboard to my 360, casually glancing at my gamercard and seeing the 13,600+ score I had grown accustomed to. For some reason I made a small tie to experience points in D&D, and smirked as I calculated that, were gamerscore experience points, I’d be level five. When I was walking home from work another day after, I thought more about it, and down I spiraled into the deep well of insanity and inanity.

(more…)

I went to a GameStop with some friends on Sunday where they had broken the street date on Operation Darkness, so I decided to pick it up while I was there and give it a go. Since today is the actual release date for the game, I figured I’d put some impressions up of my first two to three hours with the game. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to get to some of the more meatier gameplay elements, so I’ll be posting another set of impressions at a later date when I can go into further detail.

Story and Graphics

The first thing I’ll be touching on is the story and graphics because, so far, they are the weakest element of the game.

Firstly, for those of you unfamiliar, Operation Darkness takes place during World War II, and follows the mythology that Hitler was up to some paranormal stuff (a la Hellboy).

Now, it’s too early to determine whether the story as a whole is poor, but the delivery certainly is. Everything about the game’s graphics and cut-scenes suggest this should have at least been a budget title, if not released on a lower powered platform such as the Wii or PS2. The graphics are poor, there’s very little to the environments, and the game just looks like a PS2 launch title. On the few occasions that the game actually has 3-D cut scenes, the characters are not in any way animated. They may move a little bit, but there’s no real motion to go with the audio. It feels like I’m playing a game a lot older than Operation Darkness really is.

What truly grates me is most of the story isn’t even delivered in full 3-D. Most of the story is delivered in the same 2-D cut-out style of games like Trauma Center (if you don’t know what I mean, then this video will give you an idea, only fewer animations and the presence of voice acting). If I had paid less than $60 for the game, this wouldn’t bother me. However, the game was sold at full price, and this sort of small-budget presentation just doesn’t cut-it.

Fortunately, not everything about this game is disappointing.

(more…)

This past weekend I got to see The Forbidden Kingdom at the cheapo theater, and the weekend before that I got to see the Incredible Hulk. Both of them were entertaining enough movies, but nothing stellar. I can certainly say the Hulk isn’t a bad film to drop a full price ticket on, but I’m glad I waited for the cheapo theater to see The Forbidden Kingdom. It turned out to be something different than expected, than they even bothered to advertise.

Firstly, The Incredible Hulk. Edward Norton is a fantastic Bruce Banner, playing the character perfectly. In fact, all of the actors do a pretty good job, with the exception of Liv Tyler. I don’t know if it was the character, the directing or her, but I just couldn’t have cared less for her character. I’m beginning to think maybe it’s the actress herself, and not just Peter Jackson writing her into parts of Lord of the Rings where she didn’t belong.

The story is pretty straight forward. Bruce doesn’t want to be found, the military keeps going after him, Rosencran-er, I mean, Tim Roth, becomes obsessed with fighting it and eventually turns into the Abomination, and the two fight it out. You can piece it together from the previews. Still, it’s written in an entertaining enough manner to keep you interested, and the film is paced just right. You never get bored of the story, and the action never seems to take forever.  All in all, a pretty good film.

Now, as for The Forbidden Kingdom, only see it if you dig the Kung Fu. If you’re not much a fan of Kung Fu films, then the story is going to have you running for the nearest toilet and spewing your insides. You see, this geeky kid from Boston that loves Kung Fu films gets caught up with some punk kids that force him to do something he doesn’t want to, and this all gets him magically teleported to Ancient China. Yes, it’s really one of those stories. While such a tale can still be good if executed well, it just felt ridiculous here.

However, this film has Jacki Chan and Jet Li. While all other exposition in the film is boring, the writing and acting between these two is just as much as you’d want it to be. They give you plenty of laughs, and the fight between the two of them is everything I would hope such a fight would be. In fact, that’s pretty much the top reason to pay to see this film: seeing Jacki Chan and Jet Li fight each other.

Ultimately, the dialogue is poor, one of the characters can’t stop speaking in the third person, and the short story segments are mostly uninteresting, though there are also some humorous moments. What you are really watching here is a decent Kung Fu flick with some good fighting. It’s not the most amazing, but if you’d like to see Jacki Chan fight Jet Li, give it a rent. If you don’t care about that and plot is always important to you, then steer clear.

I like to write reviews for games, even if they’ve been out for a few weeks. This is mostly because I know plenty of people that rarely get games on launch, and also because most reviews don’t actually bother with completing an entire game. Plus, reviewers nowadays are full of crap and have no real understanding of what makes good game design. They just like to spit out “I think it’s fun” or “I didn’t like it” in five to ten paragraphs. A review should be a full analysis of a game, and note its merits and its flaws.

Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to complete Ninja Gaiden 2 yet, and likely won’t for a while yet, so a full on review has to wait. However, I have no problem throwing up some impressions for those that have yet to drop cash on the game.

(more…)

In this day and age, it’s hard to imagine a game that needs a sequel. After all, there are so many franchises milking their names for all it is worth, and plenty of bad games getting sequels whether we like it or not. However, there are some games that have one iteration and that’s it. Some games that could seriously benefit from today’s available technology.

There are plenty of games that I would love to see brought back with a number two on the box. In fact, if I go over every single game I’ve ever played, I’m sure I could find dozens of titles that need either a sequel or a remastering. For today, however, I will stick to some more recent shooters (mostly because that’s all I could come up with off the top of my head.

(more…)

So typically I’m used to hitting up The Escapist and finding something to rant or bitch about on their forums. So imagine my surprise when I read a headline that, without seeing the article, makes me want to complain about it. After all, blogs are for complaining, right? In any case, GSC Game World has chosen to make it vocal that, apparently, us Americans have trouble understanding Eastern European gameplay. That’s how they explain their game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl selling poorly in the states.

Now, I remember back when I was a senior in high school and finding out about S.T.A.L.K.E.R. for the first time. I thought it looked fantastically awesome. It was like Morrowind with guns. I was excited about it, particularly because at the time I felt like my computer could actually handle such a game. After all, it played Aliens vs. Predator 2 and Planetside well enough! Pretty much every friend I had in high school that played video games, even if the only game was Counter-Strike, was looking forward to this. When I left for College, I had a few friends that were also excited about it.

(more…)

I know, Starcraft: Ghost was a long, long time ago, and to talk about it now is just absolutely silly. However, I got to thinking about it when pondering a different blog topic, and figured instead of digressing there I’d just dedicate an entry to Ghost.

Now, I’m not a Starcraft fanatic. Fact is I’ve never played it. Everyone I know has played it, but I have lived a life of having computers that are poor gaming machines, and even when it could play games I was too busy spending money on console games. So my attachement to Starcraft: Ghost is not some crazy fanboyism. Well, it is, but not to the franchise. See, I liked the original gameplay clips, but then I found out Blizzard picked up Swingin’ Ape Studios to finish the game after the original team gave them the finger. Swingin’ Ape previously had made Metal Arms: Glitch in the System, the studio’s premier game. I loved it. A perfect combination of humor, gameplay and multiplayer. So I find out Blizzard grabs these guys to do the game and I’m psyched. I see the new gameplay and I’m further psyched (primarily because I tend to suck at stealth, so being able to just shoot everything pleased me greatly).

Then the Xbox 360 came out and Blizzard said “yeah, we’ve swallowed Swingin’ Ape up to be our console division, but we are cancelling Ghost because we want to focus on the next-gen consoles”. Well damn. Naturally, three years or more have passed since the cancellation and no word on what Swingin’ Ape, or “Blizzards console division”, is up to.

(more…)

Just the same as Duke Nukem Forever, the game Halo Wars is going to be facing some tough times from the gaming audience upon its release. It all has to do with the age old fight of RTS games on consoles traditionally being crap. Of course, it doesn’t help that people’s idea of what makes a game an RTS is so incredibly broad. Whenever you mention the genre, instantly everyone is thinking about War/StarCraft. Forget that the letters stand for “Real-Time Strategy”, if it doesn’t have resource management and an interface requiring a mouse, and generally just doesn’t look like War/StarCraft, then it’s clearly not an RTS.

(more…)

For those of you not familiar, I’m not a fan of the Playstation 3. In fact, I’m not a fan of Sony as a whole. Their first-party games are subpar, the Playstation 2 came out of the box broken (it was an even worse case than the Xbox 360, just no one bothered to report it because it’s more fashionable to hate Microsoft), and every pair of headphones or CD player I have purchased from them died within a year of purchase. This is nothing to say of the conceited attitude they had developed, the constant lies they pumped out concerning the performance of the PS2 and PS3, and their complete lack of quality control. Think of all the games developed by Nintendo and Microsoft Games Studios that have been excellent, and now think of all the Sony brand games on the Playstation system that were excellent.

(more…)

I frequent The Escapist pretty much daily. It’s come to be the only “major” gaming website that I can trust (I put “major” in quotes as it isn’t as popular as sites like IGN and GameSpot, and half of its membership is really only there for Zero Punctuation). The news provided is trustworthy, and the articles are often written by intelligent men and women with a lot of good things to say for the game industry. I may not always agree with what is said, but I rarely tend to dislike the writings of one of their authors.

The forums, on the other hand, are a different story. I tend to avoid forums because anyone with a brain and willingness to say “I don’t think Twilight Princess was that great, and certainly not worthy of a 9 or 10 out of 10″ is instantly insulted. Any back-up you may receive on these forums will pretty much use phrases like “nintenfag” as their own arguments and justification. This leaves me throwing my hands up into the air and walking away.

The Escapist is, for the most part, intended for the more intellectual gamer, and the forums technically flow the same. Granted ever since Zero Punctuation gained popularity there has certainly been an increase in idiocy in decrease in average I.Q., but there are still plenty of intelligent people making comments.

Yet even amongst the intellectual, some of the same old problems arise. In fact, all new ones arise that are just as frustrating. Instead of arguing Halo vs. Killzone you find yourself arguing Halo vs. Half-Life, which just feels ridiculous as the two games are only similar in being major first person shooters. Half-Life’s focus is not the combat, and Halo’s focus is not the puzzles. The games are great for different reasons, but for so many reasons Half-Life is like this golden calf of gaming to the intellectual, while Halo is just another pig in the mudpen.

One of the most recent irritations to me is Duke Nukem Forever, and this goes for gamers of all kinds.

(more…)