Where'd my flames go?

For Xmas, I got time to play more GTA3:SA. Grabbed my Broadway from the garage, but the flame paint was gone! Wack. Also ran into the basketball save bug where saving in Mad Dogg's mansion makes all the basketballs in the game disappear. Aggravating. I've been running a number of the asset missions, as up until now I'd only gotten the Roboi Food Mart and Vendant (sp?) Meadows airstrip. Found out I needed to finish driving school to buy Wang's Cars (har har), so did that in an hour or so. Had left it without finishing earlier, as the tasks are pretty tedious. Now have Wangs, the Valet, Meadows, and Roboi. Also finally shelled out for high respect clothes.

Was surprised to see a decent amount of character development happen within a non-required mission set. That's either bad design for minimalist gamers like me, or a good reward for completists. I'm coming down on the bad design side; it was only boredom and luck that had me start these missions back up, and the bonding between Caesar and CJ and the development of Kindle (CJ's sister) is pretty important context for the last few missions I'm running.

One part of the game that I was upset I didn't take advantage of fully before moving on was the gang war "minigame". I'm happy to see the game ends with it, give or take, as you grab your brother out of prison and start taking back the neighborhood. Like I just mentioned, doing the Wang's Cars missions helps set up a Sweet vs. Kindle, hood vs. escapism tension in the proverbial plot. Sorta fortuitous that I came back to those missions now (about two real-life years after playing San Fiero the first time).

GTA:SA remains the best alternative to my WoW addiction, as I can play for a week without shelling out for a month. Wish I had a ready platform for GTA4 when I finish, but neither of my computers quite make the minimum cut.

MGS4: Finished

Final score:

MGS4 Notes

These could be spoilers. You've been warned.

1. If I'm going to play a Brother's Keeper mission, and said brother at one point tries not to get in trouble, but later goes out of his way to get in trouble for no apparent reason, then I hate it. Seriously.
   
2. Also, if said brother follows a space-filling curve when there are obviously better paths that he should be able to see with his own eyes, then I hate it.
3. Too many sick people at the end of Act 3/beginning of Act 4. What the heck?
4. I don't think this is just poor translation, but the conversations are even more stilted than ever. Not one bit of this sounds like two people having a conversation. It sounds like two people reading lines. Spontaneity is zero.
5. Partitioning the game into 4+ acts has really broken the game into pieces that make it feel like a series of set pieces instead of a continuous adventure. At this point, MGS3 is winning.
6. Is this just the culmination of the gameplay ideas (when you do play, it is at least entertaining) across a patchwork of pieces that Kojima felt were needed to tie the whole sprawling story up with a bow? That is, because it wants to be the end, it has no choice but to go from place to place to make it coherent ... and fails to be as coherent as the previous games precisely for that reason.
   

Asus XG Station Approaches Availability - Tom's Hardware

This, from January 13th of this year:

Announced around a year ago, Asus' external graphics enclosure is nearly production ready, according to company sources.

The XG Station houses a single or double-slot PCI-Express x16 graphics card, using a notebook's Express Card interface to provide x1 bandwidth. This allows an included (unspecified model) mainstream graphics card to exceed Intel's 965GM performance by over 6.7 times, according to Asus.

Crimminy, release it already. I'm not to the point that I need it; I doubt I will for some time with my tower sitting at home with the same slot. But man, this is a cool piece of hardware. If you game with a laptop, this would extend its gaming life by a year or three, albeit in a somewhat clunky fashion [as you need an external monitor]. Still, sounds great for home gaming, and if you got a socketed processor on the motherboard, would nearly eliminate my need desire for a tower.

Rock Band (PS2): Da Wife Loves Drums

Got Rock Band for the PS2 yesterday evening. Once she got the hang of it, Rebecca was very keen on the drums.

Which is good, because the song list doesn't appeal to her vocally -- about half the songs neither of us know, and nearly all the songs are hard rock sung by growly men. So the original scheme -- Rock Band as Guitar Hero for me and simultaneously Karaoke Revolution for her -- isn't working out. Maybe by the time the second Track Pack comes out the PS2, they'll have Blondie and the B-52's on there.

But the drums she likes. Although the foot pedal is still tricky. Tricky to get comfortable, tricky to figure out how to work effectively, and then just tricky. She would really like the "easy" difficulty to not include the foot pedal, so she could get comfortable with the other stuff first.

It certainly seems like "easy" guitar is much easier than "easy" drums. As established in Guitar Hero, "easy" for guitar means it only uses the first three fret keys. I don't have crazy fingers, but on "easy" I effortlessly stay at the top of the fan meter. It seems that "easy" drums means using the blue drum is rare or nonexistent, but red, yellow, green, and orange foot pedal are generally all represented. Some "Act I" tracks use the foot pedal barely at all, but others use it nonstop. Some more tutorials on drums, or an easier-than-easy level, seem warranted.

Another "feature" of the drums is that they're loud. That is, Rebecca can't really hear the music or drums from the game over the noise of her slappin' the skins. (The obvious answer for this is to crank up the volume, but it's notable that I can hear it just fine and she can't.) The guitar strumbar was redesigned for quietness, so having the drums so noisy is a little weird. I don't remember practice pads being so loud, but then again, I played trumpet. (Better put quotes around "played".)

Of course, _I_ want to get headphones hooked up to the audio out so Rebecca'll look like a real studio drummer. But that's just me.

Despite these issues, Rock Band does indeed rock. The drums open up the gameplay to a broader range of players, and the cooperative feel is electric. If the song list were also more accessible to the Karaoke crowd, it could be even better. I know the downloadable songs of the current-gen versions ameliorate this somewhat, but even those feature only a handful of female vocalists and barely any pop, none from this decade.

Okami (PS2): First 12 hrs

Innovative and with an artistic style all its own, but the user interface sometimes disrupts an otherwise excellent game. Dialogue can sometimes be "clicked through" to hurry it up, but often not. Painting challenges punish the player for losing by suffering through the long lead-up sequence again. And no, you can't get out of the challenge entirely -- once you're in the "Konohana Shuffle" challenge, the only ways out are to succeed or power off. (Note: this is the sort of poor interface problem that might be overlooked by a reviewer -- so far, Okami is fairly easy, and if you don't screw up one of these challenges, you'll never see how annoying it is.) "Helpful hints" from the dino-buddy are sometimes timed so poorly as to be laughable -- suggesting you practice with a new weapon, for example, when immediately thereafter you are forced into the most challenging battle thus far with no opportunity for such practice. (This guy is called Waka, and he is by far the most annoying Tao master I have ever met, fictionally or otherwise. And I suffered through Confessions of a Taoist on Wall Street.)

Nevertheless, the style is distinctive, the play mechanic is unique, and the emphasis is on exploration and discovery, not twitch skills or resource management. If you're a fan of Ico, this is a very different game that I think will equally appeal to you.

MMORPG Extraplayinganza

One month of UO two years after one month of UO years after years of UO:
I believe the guy writing The Worst Ninja has things down pretty well. He's approaching UO for the first time, making all the too-contrived conventions appear that much more obviously. Here's a quote from my favorite part of his descriptions of his 14-day trial.

[The bank, where long-time players discard items they can't fit in their bank box on the ground] is a treasure trove. Armour, weapons, magic talismans, mysterious keys and, best of all, a complete, joyously humiliating jester outfit, which I duly don and prance about in for the benefit of my silent patrons. And then, there it is. Thank you, thank you, thank you, kind strangers. An axe. A huge, magic axe, several orders of magnitude more powerful than my geeky claws. I don’t care about its magic, though. This could be a one-of-a-kind ancient elven heirloom for all I care. All I care is that it can chop down bloody trees. At last, I can be the ninja-jester-lumberjack I’d always dreamt of becoming.

The picture of the guy's worth a look.

It is much easier to kill things now. Mobs drop lots more magical loot than before as well. Kingdom Reborn's interface would be much nicer if the sys reqs weren't so high and it didn't crash my box at least once an hour. I did enjoy the special moves you can pull off in combat, which is also a new feature, but this is still no game for the soloer with so many more enjoyable options out there. The majority of the interface still stinks, and for the first time I can ever remember I wasn't able to retrieve my corpse in time and lost some gear. No big deal, but I was upset to see that the stuff I'd dropped on the ground was still there though my adventuring gear disappeared with my body.

Oh well. I like that it's still around.

EVE Online

14 day trial wasn't bad. The game looks great, that's for sure, and they're able to pull off the simulation-first goal of UO very well. For instance, you will almost certainly be buying all your new gear via contracts with other players. When I bought a new ship, it was player made. This is good -- a true economy. I'm sure there are drains somewhere, but for the most part it appears to be about as closed a economic loop as you can get. I've also read a number of interviews with EVE folk that show that their push was to build a good, persistent, impressive simulation rather than just the tired cartoon that is WoW (which I'll still be playing soon).

My only gripe is that fighting seems to be pretty much a big dice-roll fest. I'd rather have Elite-like dogfights, and those aren't found here. You control your ship with the mouse, afaict, making it move to points, or you select targets and orbit (including combat) or get within x meters and stop. There's no real evasive action, though until you learn to target sans mouse, it sure feels like there is.

Even with the older client, it's a gorgeous game. Really, it is. That I enjoyed quite a bit. If I was going to play two MMORPGs at a time, this would be a great change of pace from UO/CoH/WoW. It's very tempting, but the complete lack of twitch play turns me off.

City of Heroes

There's a certain type of game engine that makes me puke. This is one. I get green playing it. In my first shot, I didn't interact with other players much at all, ran through some very boring missions (not unlike ones "real" heroes in comic books do, but without the character development/exploration), and ran away from some of the tougher two-bit street crooks between mission goals. The engine is very dated, with 2-D textures on walls, eg. Reminds me of Tek Wars, another game that made me puke, and, yes, Perfect Dark (yet another pukefest when someone actually commented that I looked green after playing on the floor for a few hours). But the reminder wasn't just the queasiness, but the tech in the engine. Tired engine, bland missions, and large headaches means they likely won't be getting my dough. I'd like to play more to give it a longer chance, but my personal, physical reaction will probably nix that.

Malas in UO remind you of anywhere?

Boy this sure looks familiar.

It's a land introduced by the Age of Shadows expansion to UO that has continents floating in stars, breaking up into tiny piece, not at all unlike what happened in the Burning Crusade expansion for WoW.