February 18, 2008 9:25 am
I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the forming trend of me writing my blog post about the very first press release of the day, but I’m personally stoked about the announcement that N+ will be coming to Xbox Live Arcade this week.
If you haven’t already, please check out Metanet’s original N, which is available for free and which is essentially the standard for all Flash-based games, as well as all games brave enough to address a ninja’s insatiable lust for gold. I’ll be curious to see how significant the new content and features in N+ will be, particularly when you consider the difference between a game that’s $10 on Xbox Live Arcade and a game that’s absolutely free on the PC.
Then again, N is so goddamn good, I almost feel like the $10 I’ll spend for N+ will be retroactively paying for good times had previously.
APROPOS OF NOTHING: I hear the requests for an iTunes feed for the podcast, and rest assured it’s being worked on. Last night was my first experience publishing a podcast, so I’m still soaking up a lot of information about the process.
Posted in games | 13 Comments »
February 18, 2008 1:54 am
Welcome, and thank you for participating in the soft launch of the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast! There’s no explicit format yet, and it probably should’ve been encoded it at a lower bit rate, but hey! Fuck it!
This week, Ryan and Jeff ramble pointlessly over Skype about Gatorade, HD-DVD, GDC, and more!
Next week, there’s apparently going to be another show! And maybe another guest! And prizes?
If you have a question for the Arrow Pointing Down Podcast, send it to podcast@arrowpointingdown.com, and you might get it read on the air!
By listening to this podcast, you may be eligible to win hundreds of millions of gold krugerrand. This is a lie!
Posted in games, movies, podcast | 223 Comments »
February 15, 2008 9:33 am
It’s the morning after the last day, and I was awoken at an ungodly hour by a combination of hangover and girlfriend. Feeling compelled to check email for any bites from PR people or random PayPal donations, I am greeted by a press release for Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, which immediately conspires with the toxins in my body to become an even more resilient SuperHangover. Forget for now the questionable decision to base a full-on retail game around a single band, and let me draw your attention to the headline of this press release:
WORLD RENOWNED RECORDING GROUP AEROSMITH ROCKS THIS WAY TO GUITAR HERO®: AEROSMITH® (bolding added for effect)
The press release itself then goes on to “quote” “Steven Tyler” and “Joe Perry” about this awesome brand-leveraged product licensing opportunity, and massaged/manufactured quotes sits right next to overuse of superlatives on Ryan’s Great Big Bus of Press Release Pet Peeves. Now I realize that writing press releases is not a fine art, and I’m not always the most best goodester of word doers myself, but this (and many, many other) press releases are comprised primarily of superlatives, or superlative-derived products. Using more of them doesn’t make them more effective. You eventually reach a point where it all turns into gibberish, like when you say “blog” too many times. It kinda defeats the purpose of the whole thing.
Here is the first image of Guitar Hero: Aerosmith. I am a little terrified of this unkillable mannequin robot playing the part of Steven Tyler in this game. Is there a raccoon in his hair?
The lesson to be gleaned from this is that you shouldn’t check your email and then hastily write an ill-tempered blog about it when you have a hangover.
Posted in games | 15 Comments »
February 12, 2008 12:18 am
My GameFly frustration continues as my request for No More Heroes is passed over in favor of Culdcept Saga for the 360. Fellas, if you’re not going to send a game that’s listed as having “low stock”, please just say “YO WE AIN’T HAVE IT” because that is what you mean. Still, I figured I should make sunshine out of lemonade here, so I’ve tossed the game in, and am just gonna throw off some thoughts as I dig into it. Think of it as somewhere between live blogging and the raw notes of a reviewer, but without the final judgment. This is probably for my benefit more than yours, just a chance to go off the head about a game that I’m not personally or professionally invested in, but what’s a personal blog if not a little self-indulgent? I should also preface this with the fact that I have no prior experience with culdcepts, though I’m fairly well versed in sagas. OK, herewego!
Character creation screen, pretty limited, just hairstyle, hair color, skin color, name. Go with orange-mopped, fair-skinned moppet. His name will be Ghostface.
Starts off with extremely generic, achingly sincere Japanese RPG business. Ghostface is a young boy from poor village, parents dead, blah blah blah, and now we’re wrapping up the prologue with a sentence. A sentence of great forboding, which ended with elipses…
Dialog is stilted like you knew it would be. Favorite line so far, “Do your dreams call upon you to follow your fate!?!”
Characters are called cepters, not characters. Trying to piece together the etymology (word guts) of culdcept and cepter. Can one cept? Is there an act of cepting?
First round is a tutorial, introducing me to the wonders of what appears to be a loony amalgamation of a Namco RPG, Magic: The Gathering, and Monopoly. These are not flavors which I generally enjoy, but so far I’m kind of intrigued.
About a half-hour later, finished my first round, and so far my initial assessment of influences stands. You run your little thimble around a track, buying up pieces of land, the more pieces of the same color you have, the more toll you can charge when other players land on your spaces. The twist, though, is that you can try and wiggle your way out of paying tolls, and even take over your enemy’s spot, through the drawing of some cards. I wonder how long before this becomes more complicated than I care for, but so far, likin’ it.
That lasts until we get back to a cutscene, where I’m being inundated with text, character portraits of characters that are standing right there, and voice-acting that alternates between breathless and stilted. Apparently Ghostface is some kind of prophet or messiah or the Dalai Lama or something. You’d think he’d be more stoked about that. Also just noticed that Ghostface appears to be wearing mummy pants.
The slave trader character is vaguely ethnic, though his voice distinctly eastern European, and I have to wonder what he sounds like in Japanese.
Ghostface busts out a “….” line, Duke-Togo-style, twice within the span of a minute. Dude is apprehensive a lot!
Round 2 pits me against a dude that appears to be half-man, half-goat, half-cleft-chin. Map layout’s a little more complicated, and other new details are emerging.
Another 30-40 minutes, and round two is complete, and I now know two things about Culdcept Saga.
#1: This is a pretty damn interesting game, a pretty dynamic blend of a number of different influences, reminding me of a kind of long-haul version of what Catan and Carcassone deliver.
II) This is not a game I care to invest myself in any further. It’s interesting, but the story stuff starts out so insufferable that I do not care to put myself through more of it. Once upon a time that shit was charming, but I’m over it. The pacing is also a real killer. The beauty of games like Carcassone and Catan is that the matches are over pretty quickly. Culdcept Saga already feels slow, and I can only imagine that the rounds get more complicated and convoluted as the game progresses. Perhaps less a condemnation of the game than it is a sad commentary on my own attention span, but there you go.
And with that, Culdcept Saga goes back into the GameFly envelope.
PS: I feel like I’m ripping off his steez a little bit here, or that I was at least thinking about it when I started writing this, so do yourself a favor and check out Kyle Orland’s Games for Lunch if you want some off-the-head impressions of games.
Posted in games | 18 Comments »
February 5, 2008 9:36 am
I had a nice little chat over IM with Joystiq’s Kyle Orland last night, which he whipped up into this nice little story this morning. I generally feel good about it, though I was probably more guarded than I needed to be. The major points that I really felt were worth making around all of this nonsense are that:
A) This is not the editors’ fault. Those guys are more pissed off than any of you could possibly be about how this all went down, and the installation of Ricardo Torres as Editor in Chief was done specifically to patch the wall between editorial and sales that was ever-so-briefly breached. He, more than anyone else in this world, wants to see GameSpot’s integrity restored and see its editorial direction put back on track.
#2. Kane & Lynch didn’t fire Jeff. I believe it was a factor in his termination, but I think it was more emblematic of the relationship between the upper management and the senior editorial teams. I’m not privy to the specifics of that relationship, but I believe they felt our reviews were unfairly critical, and that was impeding on ad dollars, which should give you a good sense of where their priorities lie. Personally, I played Kane & Lynch this past weekend, and though I went in thinking that maybe Jeff had been a little harsh, by the time I got to the nightclub level I thought Jeff’s review couldn’t have been more honest and completely on-target.
Anyway, at this point I’ve said just about all I can/need to say about this topic. Moving on!
Posted in games | 33 Comments »
February 4, 2008 3:07 pm
In a move that I have to imagine surprises no one, it has come out officially that I’ll be resigning from GameSpot (Joystiq gets the link for using my favorite picture.) While I’m confident in the Internet’s ability to distill this into screaming hyperbole about “moneyhats”, I assure you that my departure is a little more complicated than that. I will say that Jeff’s termination was certainly a catalyst. It shook my faith in the people running GameSpot, something I haven’t recovered from.
A few months have past since all that shit went down, and now editors and producers are getting back to work, trying in earnest to pick up the pieces and get GameSpot back on track, but my heart’s just not in it. I feel awful about dragging down the people who’ve still got something to give. I honestly could’ve coasted for a while longer here, but these are people who I deeply respect and will miss terribly, and I don’t want to make their jobs any harder in these troubled times than they already are. It takes a whole lot of energy to keep this massive machine running smoothly, and they deserve someone who’s going to give it their all.
I want to be crystal clear about this point: from Ricardo Torres on down, GameSpot’s editorial and video teams represent an incredible assembly of talented and dedicated people, and it has been an honor and a pleasure to get to work alongside so many truly brilliant people. I hold nothing against the people who actually create the content you see on GameSpot, and through all of this drama and confusion, I hope you won’t either.
I’m 28 years old, and GameSpot has been an important part of my personal and professional life for nearly eight years–this isn’t just where I go to work, it’s where my friends are, it’s where I funnel much of my humor and creativity. It’s time for me to go, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to miss it. Unless something dramatic happens (which, at this point, wouldn’t surprise me) my last day at GameSpot will be February 14th. Happy Valentimes!
After that, I’m taking a little break. I’ll be doing some freelance writing to keep my brain limber, spending more time with my girlfriend, and generally enjoying a bit of a reprieve from the regular 9-to-5. You can be rest assured that I’ll continue writing in this space, though, as I can’t keep my opinions to myself, and I love the sound of my own voice. I’ve been considering launching my own podcast featuring all my famous friends, and maybe a line of handbags as well. Oh yeah, and I’ll definitely be spending plenty of time, money, and energy advocating the use of LAFF instead of LOL. Stay tuned!
Posted in games | 76 Comments »
February 4, 2008 8:53 am
Even before my day gets a chance to become interesting on its own, I get this post by Introversion lead programmer Chris Delay dropped in my lap, courtesy of Kotaku. While not everyone will find the technical info about rendering structural details in virtual skyscrapers fascinating (I do!), I’m simply excited at the prospect of a new game by Introversion. If you haven’t heard of them, Introversion is an extremely independent developer that specializes in minimalist, high-concept games. Its two significant releases, Darwinia and Defcon (both available on Steam if you haven’t checked them out already), are both visually severe games with very specific and unique gameplay philosophies.
These are what games would look like if you were to give the technology of today to video game designers in the early 1980s.
I found Defcon to be particularly evocative, and not just because I love WarGames (I do!) but also because of how much it does with so little. It’s basically a thermonuclear warfare simulator, and its tagline of “Everybody Dies”, along with a gameplay model where “winning” is a matter of losing less of your population to the thermonuclear holocaust than your opponents, give you good sense of its grim tone. That’s fascinating enough on its own, but then another layer is added with the stark launch-terminal visuals and the quiet hum of technology in the background, which subtly suggest that, within the reality of the game, what you’re seeing is more than just a simulation. I rarely call something “chilling!” unless I’m being quoted on the back of a Dean Koontz novel, but Defcon definitely merits it.
Posted in games, movies | 4 Comments »
February 3, 2008 11:44 am
For something that is so central to the Xbox experience, it’s surprising how slapdash aspects of Xbox Live can be. The recent outage is a grand example, but it’s stuff like posting the wrong versions of XBLA games, or the recently posted Oceanic Airline theme that drive me crazy. If you haven’t already, download the Oceanic theme, and load it up. Check out the text near the bottom of the screen. Count the number of times it says “Oceanic”. Now drink!
In the grand scheme of things it’s just a simple typo, but how are there no safeguards, no adequate QA processes in place to make sure shit like that doesn’t happen?
UPDATE: With no available images of this on the Internet, I’ve taken the law into my own hands. I owe you nothing, ABC Studios!
Posted in games | 5 Comments »
January 31, 2008 8:26 am
Bought Resolution High Definition (Rez HD to industry insiders) off Xbox Live Marketplace yesterday, almost compulsively. I feel completely comfortable calling this the definitive version or Rez, despite the occasional blurry texture, and I think that 800 points (10 dolla) is the perfect price for this game.
I was a little late to the party on Mass Effect, as I only started playing it a month ago, and I haven’t touched it in a good week, but it’s still a game I think about pretty regularly, if only because of what a compellingly imperfect product it is. After 15 hours of play I’m completely sick of the combat, exploring these vast, featurless planets, the wicked load times, and basically everything that’s not dialog. Everything that is dialog, though, is what makes that game worth playing. I’m consistently impressed with the quality of the writing and the voice-acting, though it’s the little details that really make it, like the consistency of how the camera frames the speakers or the timing between responses. It really makes me wish that game was strictly people standing around, chatting. How’s that for a vision of video-game excitement?
As a quick thought unrelated to games, Netflix has been bumming me out pretty hard lately. My queue is mostly filled with blu-ray and hd-dvd movies, but if it’s a new release or even just a movie that’s well-regarded, they never ever have it in stock in HD. What’s worse, the last two movies they sent me (Stargate and The Devil Wears Prada, because THAT’S ALL THEY HAVE) arrived with slight cracks in the discs that made them unplayable. So to summarize, they don’t send me the movies that I actually want, and the ones they do send are showing up broken. I realize this isn’t 100% Netflix’s fault, but it’s a confluence of misfortune that have left me pretty dissatisfied with the service as of late. At least their turnaround time is still consistently quick (I’m looking in your direction, GameFly.)
Posted in games, movies | 12 Comments »
January 27, 2008 11:31 am
Oh yeah, and I guess welcome to the arrow pointing down blog! It still doesn’t have any meaningful direction, and those holding their breath hoping it will are gonna go out like Michael Hutchence. Between you and me, this blog was born out of a frothy tincture of laziness and a need to fit in–my hosting service had a one-click install option for wordpress, and all my unemployed friends have been doin’ it. Since this is the first substantial post here, I wanted to get down a few fleeting thoughts.
Video games:
Been playing Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. The gameplay is unsurprisingly good, but Nintendo dropped the ball by changing the tone of the series from fun-time anime war-stuff to final-fantasy-serious war-stuff. The writing just isn’t insightful enough to address the horrors of war in a serious manner without coming off as pretentious, cheesy, and shallow. War is bad, we get it. Also, you’ll hear the same half-rock/half-military theme music for almost the entire duration of the game, and the only way to get it out is with a bullet.
Also been playing Burnout Paradise, though not nearly as much as Jeff or Rich. I like it the more I play it, but I can’t yet say that I love it. It’s got the hallmarks of a great Burnout game, with an incredible sense of speed and car crashes that verge on pornographic, and the open-world format-shift was entirely necessary, but I still feel like I have to make too many excuses and apologies for it. I guess some of my issues with Paradise come from my own expectations of what a Burnout game should be, and in some regards, I think it doesn’t quite deliver. For the record, Burnout 3: Takedown is still the best game in the series.
Not video games:
Brad Shoemaker pointed me towards ConjugalHarmony.com on Friday, and it has haunted my every waking moment since. I’m afraid I might be stepping into doofycrap territory here, but it’s fascinating to me how wildly one’s priorities can change once you’ve been locked up. These women cannot afford to be anything less than totally honest about themselves and their situations, which leads to some terrifyingly casual comments like this:
Convictions: I beat up this bitch cop with my bare knuckles and she died so I’m done for life. Lets chat!
Movies:
Went to a drive-in double-feature last night, my second in the past month or so. My girlfriend lives just a few miles from one of only maybe six drive-in theaters still in operation in California, and I’m grateful for it. I have fond memories of drive-ins from when I was very, very young, and even though it’s terribly run-down and it attracts a kind of sketchy crowd and is on the verge of being shut down, it’s still a novel experience.
The movies were Rambo and National Treasure: Book of Secrets. Rambo is an almost startlingly straightforward rescue flick that is really boring whenever someone isn’t being murdered in a horribly graphic way. National Treasure: Book of Secrets was probably better than the first National Treasure, but I’m finding Nic Cage’s hairline increasingly hard to look at, I feel embarrassed for Jon Voight running around like he’s Action Grandpa, and the conceit of the series–that all of America’s historical artifacts exist solely as elaborate clues for Nic Cage’s treasure hunt–is so ridiculous and stupid that it’s distracting.
So that’s all for now. Expect fitful and often meaningless posts from here on out.
DUMBDATE: Yeah, so ConjugalHarmony is probably fake, which only diminishes its awesomeness, but it does not eliminate it.
Posted in comedy, games, movies | 12 Comments »
