“Someone should really turn off that alarm,” a Valve rep says calmly from somewhere behind me. Our team had searched every inch of this area, but someone triggered an alarm that we couldn’t find. I’d never once played with any of the other three people in my team, and we were communicating well, but that damned alarm kept going off. The third, or possibly fourth, wave of zombies crashed up against the three of us still left alive leaving our weapons and health low, our morale lower. Then I notice something from the top of the scaffolding that appears to be a control panel of sorts.

Dead To Rights Retribution
Soul Calibur PSP
Tekken 6
Katamari Forever
Brink
Wet
Fallout 3: Point Lookout
Brutal Legends
The Agency
Crime Craft
Sin and Punishment 2
Wii Sports Resort
Cave Story
Flipnote Studio
New Super Mario Brothers Wii

Pixel Junk Shooter
Fat Princess
Trash Panic
Afrika
Harvest Moon
Squishy Tank
Shiren The Wanderer
Neo Steam
Tatsunoko vs Capcom
Undead Knight
Half-Minute Hero
Fragile

When I first heard about Holy Invasion of Privacy Badman I though it would be on the slower side. More strategy, less action, kind of like the games it’s mocking. After getting some hands on time with the preview build I have to say that the game is, happily, very quickly paced and much more unique than I expected.

“When it’s done.” Lasse Seppänen, the producer for Alan Wake, has been saying that since the game was announced. Many of us have seen this language before; sometimes resulting in a fantastic but long awaited game, yet others faded away never to be heard from again. Now that the legendary when-it’s-done game—Duke Nukem Forever— is looking like it may have finally been laid to rest, the time is ripe to look at other titles that could fall into a sinkhole of vaporware.

I got a chance to do some interesting digging into the history of Alan Wake to find out what is currently know about the game. While I didn’t pick the bullet-pointed format I feel that it actually worked out for this piece.

I have one of those really snazzy Logitech Harmony remotes to control my laundry list of electronics. This was the perfect solution for using a different brand TV, A/V Receiver, DVD player, and myriad of game consoles. With the new generation of systems came Sony’s assinine idea of using only blue tooth remotes for controlling the system. The result is a mess, and I own it since I use the PS3 as my main DVD/BR player.

I know it’s not the best idea to use a game system as anything but a backup video player since any extra use just means the system will fail faster, but I don’t really have an option if I want to watch BR videos since the players are cost prohibitive. (I also hardly play any disc-based games on the system since… there aren’t many, so it’s not like I’m killing the disc drive here.) Unfortunately that really nice Harmony Remote that could control my fireplace (if I had one with remote control) can’t control the PS3 at all. I bought the official PS3 remote with a gift card since it’s neigh impossible to control a movie with the PS3 controller, and have regretted it since (follow the above link to find out why).

Luckily I wasn’t the only person in lament. Logitech has known about this and working on a solution. The device is… functional, but all it does is interperate IR signals and convert them into PS3 blue tooth commands. And it’s $60. What a pain in the ass. I blame Sony.

My second feature is up at Play Magazine online:

I like this one a bit more than the last one. I also got an opportunity to talk with Jenova Chen–creative director of Thatgamecompany–for the article, which is always a treat.

There was an update for Super Street Fighter II Turbo: HD Remix, a game notable–if for nothing else–for having an exhaustively long name. Not that this post has anything to do with that, it’s just that, damn, it’s a long name.

So, as those reading this who’ve been my friends for a very long time know already, I use to be a huge fan of fighting games. During the Dreamcast era 2D fighters were among my most played genre.  To this day I can’t escape a certain passion for King of Fighters character drama. Now that everyone’s up to speed, you may find it strange that I’ve never been too fond of the Street Fighter series. When the title was first released I was far more interested in playing Samurai Shodown, or Mortal Kombat (hey, it was cooler then). Even my friends were far more interested in these games than SF2, which caused me to naturally avoid the game.

Over time I eventually fell into place with Street Fighter when SF3 was released. I was a huge fan of the SF3 series, and to a very small extent even attempted to learn how to play Ken and Mokoto at a competetive level. I had a friend in New Orleans who helped me try to get up to speed with other competators so that I would at least be able to place somewhere above last. Long story short: that never happen.

Since that time I’ve fallen further and further from my fighting game roots. This had to do with a combination of things, first was the decline of the arcade. The few remaining ones in my area started shutting down until only one remained (which was constantly filled with High School freshman dropped off by there parents with no money and greasy hair). Shortly after that Hurricane Katrina shut down that last one, which also caused me to relocate to an area that had no arcades that I could find. Moving around a lot causes a man to lose touch with many of their friends, and also to try less and less finding new ones.

So here I am, 8 years after the peak of my fighting game salad days, back in the same general part of the country and without nearly any friends… again. I’ve wanted to pick up Street Fighter IV since its release any yet any motivation to do so goes out the window the instant I remember that there’s no one to play against. Getting back to that patch for the game: I did pick up SF2:Long Name for the PS3 because I don’t have to pay monthly to play online. Because Sony doesn’t even have a mildly respectable online framework, a patch requires me to slowly and painfully download the entire game over again. During that time I devised a plan.

 The Plan

So, here it is. Because SF2:LN actually has decent netcode and I can play versus real people online I’ve decided to attempt to regain any skill I use to have at fighting games and perhaps even grow in strength. Since the game patched I’ve had a chance to play and fought two opponent. Both games went three bouts, all of which I lost. Currently I’m working on my Cammy skills because she has a quick and frantic style which matches my play type.  Today’s discovery: I found that there’s a followup attack to her qcf+P attack! This should help my arsenal.

As a matter of obsessive habit I check Steam every Friday when I get home. Sometimes it’s like getting a present that I can share with other people. Games have been known to go so cheap they’re impossible to pass up. There’ve been a few games that I bought once for a console then re-bought on Steam for basically nothing. Five minutes ago that game was Lost Planet.

Lost Planet was one of the early release titles of this generation of consoles that gave me faith in the “new direction” at the time. Many people condemned the game for the very reasons that it apealed to me. Boiling down the game to a skeletal shell of itself leaves a player with the impression of both very-very pretty graphics, and “archaic” 16-bit design ethos.

Rather than being upset over this contrast of the very-new and the just-old-enough, I thought of it as a breath of fresh air from the stale smell that most new games around that same time gave off. Many were overly complicated first person action games. To me it felt like Capcom sat down and figured out what they could do best (that “archaic” design ethos) and then combine it with what they thought the public was looking for (bloom-infused high resolution graphics).

This seems to have confused most people who were looking for “something more.” I’ve never figured out what that exactly means. To me Lost Planet is one of the gems from this generation of console games, and for $5 I feel it’s worth giving a look if you haven’t yet.

I would like to give one award for 2008: the Bioshock award for 2008 goes to Mirror’s Edge, a game that failed to live up to its potential. Though, I’d much rather play Bioshock again.

Mirror’s Edge is possibly the greatest failure of 2008, and I must say that I appreciate the attempt. Unfortunately ME fails to live up to its potential so much that it’s a bad game. In ME there is an art gallery with little comments from the developer for each image. The one used for this post had the comment attached to it that read something like: “This is early concept art where she was still holding a gun. We removed the gun because we didn’t want to highlight the combat as a bullet point for the back of the box.”

HA!

I’m paraphrasing of course, I don’t even have the game to go back and check, nor would I want to waste the effort to do so. The reason I bring this up is because somewhere down the line the developers became brainwashed and made the game chock full of combat. Like other acrobatic games—*cough*Prince of Persia: Sands of Time*cough*—the developers had no idea how to design a decent combat engine. ME is even worse than PoP.

I stopped playing ME when I got to my fourth or fifth room in a row where as soon as you open the door you’re being shot at. Instantly there would be anywhere from two to five enemies in a room which open fire with their super-sniper-accuracy-vision and try to prevent you from reaching your objective. The problem is two-fold: the combat sucks so you’re a sitting duck most of the time with death coming on the second hit, and Faith (the main character) has no sense of self preservation at all. So, basically you have to run headfirst into the area, spend one fraction of a second assessing your situation, then acting.

This generally leads to failure over and over again that can only be overcome by trial-and-error testing. Then, once you’ve tried your route for the twentieth time and you manage to eliminate the bad guys you have to figure out how to get into that little hole at the top of the room. One of two things happen now, you either manage to fall to your death trying—because Faith won’t grab onto anything that’s not specifically hit at the right angle. Running face first into a railing that any normal person could grab and get themselves over will turn into vertigo drops of death—or more enemies spawn before you can get there.

Rather than put my blood pressure through the roof, and possibly a controller into my TV, I traded the game back. It was a Christmas gift, but I figured even though I only got a return of about 25% of the purchase cost for a game that came out a month prior it was better than letting the game stay at my house and be a horrible guest. So I got Personal Trainer: MATH for the DS. This game is also pretty disappointing, but a helpful tool so it’s better than Mirror’s Edge.