E to the E to the Electronic Three

Shit has it really been a year since the last E3? It is time then to throw my short form commentary on what seems interesting into the nether. Jesus do they only make sequels now or is that all I care about? Who is the problem here...

Uncharted 3 - The only reason I care about my dusty old PS3 just got another iteration in the story. I will be picking this game up on launch day.

Modern Warfare 3 - Despite second fiddle love for the PC market and Activision crapping all over Infinity Ward's founders I am still playing BLOPs most nights. The MW3 trailers look incredible and Elite looks benign, sign me up.

Battlefield 3 - I want this game to compete with MW3 in the worst way. I skipped Bad Company one and deux, but have a storied past with BF1942 and Vietnam. I want to come home.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations - Last year I thought Brotherhood would be a money grab. I was wrong, I can admit that. They made an awesome single and multiplayer game. I'm ready to be done with Ezio's story, but they have earned my faith in one last romp.

BioShock: Infinite - I'm hearing game of the show from twitterverse. I would not put it past Ken Levine and company if that were the case, I loved the first one.

Mass Effect 3 - Though not out till 2012 the coverage has only served in me wanting this game more.

WH40k: Space Marine - Every trailer of the actual game play looks like crap, no cover, poor graphics, bland animation. They will need to be swimming in media praise for me to even consider buying this game now. I'm super disappointed.

Wii U - Seriously who is the audience for this? They (Big N) now have a console on par with 360 and PS3, but it is 5 years too late. Getting ports of the big games that will already be available on the two systems I own does not sound appealing. Hasn't the "hardcore" audience moved on? Wait we were left behind.

Wii, Not for Mii

We procured our Wii in a middle of the night raid on Walmart more than a year ago. It was all candy canes and lolly pops for the first few months and then we wanted a new game. The novelty of Wii Sports has a long tail, but the alternatives outside of it are slim and far between. We tried out Wii Play which was not a game, but an excuse to get another controller. Then it was on to Rayman Raving Rabbids which was fun, but had unresponsive controls on occasion. The dry spell that we braved next was trying, but rewarded us with Mario Galaxy.

Post Galaxy we have yet to buy a game for coming up on a year this November. Turkey dinner games like Zelda and Mario titles are few, while half assed shovelware titles like Carnival Games and Ninjabread Man come out weekly. I can't fathom paying forty some dollars for titles that are essentially waggle based money grabs. Especially when Castle Crashers is fifteen dollars and big production games for the Xbox are sixty. Lack of quality titles on the system only serves to point out what appears to be the systems core flaw.

We were given a system with last gen graphics for the trade off of price and innovative controls. They delivered on price for sure, but have yet to deliver fully on the innovation. Beyond the waggle, point and object simulation systems released on day one there has been very little that is compelling enough to play. Third parties are flooding the market with garbage and Nintendo has no system to filter the wheat from the chaff. Why should third parties struggle to find new uses for Nintendo's controllers when the first party stopped trying a while ago? At an install base of over ten million there is little incentive to change.

Nintendo's solution to date has been to ignore the core gamers (i.e. me) and focus on selling peripherals to their customer base of soccer moms and geriatrics. The latest innovation they have come up with makes the wiimote more accurate. Well unless they plan to send one in the mail to every customer who has a wiimote (send me four please) then they are just wasting their time. Why would anyone take time and resources to produce a game that in theory would be more fit for "hardcore" gamers when the market has been fractured. Sounds good Nintendo, let me go convince my wife to sell the dust collector next to our TV. Good luck in the future when the Wii2 isn't selling because grandma is content to play her original.

Chrome Fail?
New browsers get me excited for some reason, especially from companies I view as tech community aware. So when Google announced Chrome and I read through the feature set and their new approach to web browsing and got excited to try it out. The comic helped too.

Well seeing is believing and after a brief test drive with Chrome last night I don't believe. The first thing I did was essentially a load test to populate the new tabs page with my most visited sites. It slowed to a crawl, then to a stop and then to a crash with just ten tabs open. Now the comic parody makes a little more sense and I a reluctant to go back to it with Firefox just a click away. It is easy to make the "it's still in beta" argument, but gmail has been in beta since Jesus was born.

My Wife the Geek

In the past I have written about the great extent of my geekdom and politely left my better half out of the fray. I often joke with her about putting up with my geekiness and wonder aloud if she knew what she was getting into. Earlier today a study linked on 1up caught my attention though. Apparently women are picking up game controlers like hot cakes. That got me thinking more about our roles as geek husband and geek sympathiser wife.

After collecting my thoughts and reevaluating everything I know in this life, I came to the stunning conclusion that my wife is actually a geek. Apart from hobbies that have tried to introduce to her, she has sought out and taken up a geek scepter of her own. She scrap books, knits, sews and makes jewelry...craft geek! She goes through books a mile a minute in the summer and give me grief for not keeping up with her...book geek! She owns two bikes and likes wearing bike hats in public...bike geek! She grew up playing Super Nintendo, the Wii in our house is hers and she owns a pink DS, that she has played until the battery dies on many occasions...*gasp*...game geek! Oh and did I mention she is a math teacher?

I love my geeky wife, it just took me a long time to realise that she was in fact a geek. Last night she had finished 8 of the 10 Y: The Last Man trades and wanted to make sure I had ordered the last two. We stood in line for an hour Friday night just to be seated for the Dark Knight and she even got excited about and enjoyed Hellboy 2. Life is good in our geek house. I used to make a big effort to get her in to playing WoW. Now I know that she doesn't have to participate in all my geek hobbies because she has her own. I know I don't want to knit.

Site Watch
Web comics are a procrastinators best friend and a geeky math and science related comic seems appropriate given today's topic. Go read xkcd!

R.I.P. Estelle Getty
She passed away at the age of 84 yesterday.

Out with the new

In with the Mario Galaxy! Mass Effect bid our household adieu on Friday night and I can't say I'm sorry to see it go. Galaxy is the polar opposite to Effect, it is all fun game play with no story and no need for a story quite frankly. It is the spiritual successor to M64 that Sunshine could never be. Break free from your water nozzle powered jet pack and embrace 3D platforming with twisted gravity and innovation around every sphere.

Galaxy is another first party feather in Nintendo's cap, that shows how good the Wii can be when done right and how bad third parties really are. System crisis aside this is by far the best game for the console since Wii Sports. One could make the argument that either A. It doesn't really need the Wiimote or B. It could be even better on a Gamecube controller. Either way it is just plain fun to play.

While there are a ton different planets that offer different game play styles the core mechanics are very similar to M64. Except that gravity and small spherical and sometimes not so spherical planets and bodies are brought in to play. Jumping from one bodies gravitational pull to another's is a fluid and at times treacherous affair. It eventually becomes intuitive though (roughly 20 minutes) and allows for some real wow moments. The single player game on its own has enough draw and appeal to sell widely and then there is the coop.

Like 2D Sonic games of the past Galaxy integrates a casual coop aptly named "Co-Star Mode". A second player, wiimote in hand, can join in at any time during the single player experience to enhance said experience. The second player has a number of functions, but the main task they handle is collecting star bits for extra lives and to spend on bonus planets. They can also assist with jumping higher and holding enemies/objects. It is the quintessential Tails experience, assist if you want or take a break while player one continues on. It is the cream cheese frosting on an already deliciously moist cake.

I Heart Story...

But not in the face of bad game play!

Absent from my Wreck Awards for 2007 was a "Game I was most disappointed in" award. I finished Assassin's Creed about three weeks ago and I have started Mass Effect twice since then. What I took away from each game was incredible story mixed with redundant and sometimes unfair game play. Overall Assassin's Creed seems to be the better of the pair, but it felt like I was fighting the developers of both titles to have a fun time.

Mass Effect frustrates me to no end in its game play (gun play and vehicle mechanics), but charms the pants off me in its story and writing. After the brief love affair that I had with KOTOR and the slap in the face that was KOTOR2 I was anticipating a lot form mass effect. The combat seems like it wasn't tested by anyone. For bugs yes, but what about fun? It has a cover system like a lot of games these days, but no Gears style cover button. It is a balancing act with the thumb stick to try and stay on a wall and try to lock on to targets. The enemy AI likes to charge my position all the time and one shot melee attack me or eat enough bullets to make superman hang a poster of them in his room. The frustrations only continue from there and can best be described in the following example.

On the first side mission I took, I was to travel to a planet and investigate a distress signal in a mine. I land on the planet and struggle with the vehicle controls for a few minutes, but finally made my way to the mine. I navigate the empty mine via way points and get to the source of the signal. Oh no its a trap! Some space pirate tricked me a left an armed nuke in the mine. A button press mini game pops up to disarm the nuke and I do. Upon exit of the mine I am at a higher elevation than where I entered. Waiting for me at my vehicle where four of the space pirate's goons (I guess they were confident that I would defuse the bomb). From the high point I am at I can not target them with my pistol. So I try to run down the hill to get in range only to be gunned down before I can even target them, let alone fire on them. They have sniper/assault rifles and I have a pistol.

So load it up again and try something new right? Wrong, the games auto save last ticked when I touched down on the planet, not when I finished the mini game and sat through a load scene to get outside again. So I had retread the same ten minutes of driving, empty cave searching, replay the mini game and pop up high above the same band of goons. This time I saved right away. My AI partners both had sniper rifles/assault rifles so why not them duke it out AI to AI. They both die after exchanging fire for a solid five minutes of me just ducking out of the way. Reload rinse, repeat and I got the same result. So clearly I wouldn't be able to take them head on. So upon the next load I just started running down the mountain in the opposite direction and circled back using my vehicle as cover and eventually got in it.

At this point I could have thrown it in reverse and used the menu system to get back to the ship. There are space pirates on the loose though and they just kicked my ass through four load screens. I have an ultra advanced armored space car with machine guns and missiles, advantage Wreck, end of story, there will be hell to pay! Except my vehicle drives like cream cheese on jello and the pirates small arms cut through its armor like a hot knife through butter. I had to ditch my vehicle behind cover for ten minutes while it self repaired to full. I finally dropped all the pirates and got out to collect one useless weapon and a piece of armor as my reward.

I turned off my 360 and did not load the game up again for three weeks. I started a new character who can use all weapon types and I am trying to start over. Playing through the three hours I had already been through again is painful, but I am willing to give the game a little more time. If my suffering continues though I will most likely sell it and pick up Mario Galaxy with the cash.

Wreck Awards 2007

So everyone else does it...why not me!

Game of the Year: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
I didn't think that a first person shooter could surprise me with it's story telling mechanics any more. What I mean by that is how the story is told as opposed to the actual story. Writers can always drum up a new twist that the player won't see coming, but new ways to tell that story are few and far between. The opening credit sequence in Call of Duty 4 is amazing, while I don't want to spoil it I will say that is places you in a role you have never played before. COD4 is my game of the year for 2007, but I can see myself spending a ton of time 2008 with it as well.
Runners Up: Portal and Bioshock

Game I should have played: Uncharted: Drake's Fortune
I don't own a PS3 and I don't think I will be picking one up for the foreseeable future. So out of all the games that came out this year only two PS3 exclusives sparked my interest. Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction looked cool, but my past experiences with R&C titles has been less than impressive. Uncharted is the only game that came out for the PS3 that made me thirst for three console redundancy. Maybe a high quality Jak and Daxter and/or Metal Gear game will convince me to pick up a PS3 in 2008.
Runner Up: Super Mario Galaxy

Movie of the Year: Juno
Juno was a surprise and half for me this year and was not even on my movie radar until a week before the end of 2007. I caught the trailer for the film on the apple trailers site and was hooked. I showed it to Crystal and pulled a switch-a-roo the Saturday before Christmas. It is funny, witty and in the end endearing. I now have the hots for Ellen Page and Michael Cera!
Runner Up: Knocked Up

Movie I should have seen: No Country for Old Men
I heart the Cohen Brothers, but some how I missed what would have probably been my favorite movie this year. Hope fully I will get a chance to see it in the theaters before I am relegated to an upscaled DVD. On that note someone figure out the HD disk format war soon!
Runner Up: Eastern Promises

Album of the Year: Rob Sonic - Sabotage Gigante
I got the pleasure of discovering this artist live this year when I went to DC to see Aesop Rock and Blockhead. I was blown away by Rob Sonic's performance with Aesop and picked up his newly released album Sabotage Gigante. It is a little more traditional than what I usually listen too in terms of hip hop, but you definitely wouldn't confuse it with the terrible rap you hear on MTV.
Runner Up: Avett Brothers - Emotionalism

My Friend Pete Makes Games

Originally posted at WNE on 11/06/07

Being a hardcore video game fan since I was a wee lad it is always a treat when I get to know someone who creates the medium that I love. Enter Pete, wicked Day of Defeat sniper and video game industry extraordinar. I have known Pete for going on 6 years now through the above mentioned DoD and he is a stand up guy that I consider a good friend. He currently works for Ubisoft in Canada and has previously worked for other Canadian game companies. His list of titles include a number of license based games for the GBA and his most recent work My Word Coach for the DS and Wii.

My Word Coach is the kind of game that should give Nintendo's Brain Age a run for it's money. It is edutainment, but not the kind of edutainment game I grew up with. This one actually looks fun and the multiplayer mini games look like they could get intense. As I said Pete is a good friend and he is passionate about video games so if you looking to expand your mind and have some fun My Word Coach comes out November 6th. I'll be picking up a copy sometime in the near future and I'll let you know how it pans out.

Walkthroughs and Previews @ Gametrailers
Preview @ Nintendojo

Wii > WoW

My wife and I picked up a Wii at 1am Sunday and spent the whole day playing Wii sports. So I didn't meet my goal of 68, but I did run Sethekk Halls again and I am 95% to 68. So I should hit it tonight easy with rested exp...unless I play Zelda.

Maybe it is time to combine my old love with the new one...

WoW with the Wii



Real men wii standing up,

Jafer