1up Show

Blue Dragon is looking cooler then expected...

Oh and Virtua Fighter 5 just flattened my nuts

And what the fuck is the Crossing?

The Haul

A few very brief impressions of what I'm kicking around right now.

Xenosaga III: I couldn't tell you how pleased I am with how this game is turning out. I'm a notorious hater of modern JRPGs that value viewing over playing, but for some reason I fell in love with the first Xenosaga. Then picked up Xenosaga 2, which took a steaming dump on most of the things I liked about the first one. I had heard that this was remedied in the third installment and so far, that's the truth.

Final Fantasy III: Interesting so far, It's quite refreshing to play a truly old school JPRP .

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow: Damn, this is some nice platforming action right here. The game features an interesting gimmick where you can swap between two characters on the fly, as well as have the option of keeping your partner character around following you into battle and doing combo attacks.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Wow, just wow. A friend of mine who's obsessed with this game described it as "Baldur's Gate 3." So far, I am inclined to joyously agree.

Legacy of Pain (Updated)

So I found out via the Star Trek Legacy forum, that the graphical malaise that I was experiencing is actually quite common. The game (and I think this is a first for a PC game) just sort of decides, based on its estimation of your system specs, how the game will look. You have no real say in the configuration itself...

Unless you go editing some config files to override the game's natural behavior.

And so I did, and so it now looks much closer to the advertised screen shots. Now I just need to find a way to resolve the horrid camera and simplistic gameplay and i'll be in Trek Heaven

I find it MIND BLOWING that you would need to manually edit the game's config in order to achieve the results shown ON the damned box.


Update: I've been asked to post the thread where i found this stuff so here it is.

Star Trek Legacy: Dissapointment Total

Picked this up for the PC yesterday and was expecting something like Bridge Commander or even Starfleet/Klingon Academy. What I got was something like Bridge Commander after it has been hit on the head with a hammer to the point of unconsciousness.

Graphics:
For whatever reason, even with all settings jacked, this really doesn't look all that impressive, despite what promotional materials may make one think. The ships look nice, but it certainly doesn't live up to the screenies, maybe the 360 version looks better.

Tactics:
The game screams "dumbed down for console fans," which I guess shouldn't have surprised me too much. Space is only pseudo-3d, there is very clearly an 'up' and a 'down.' To illustrate my point, lets say you hold down the 's' button for a bit (pitch your ship upward), you will angle up to a certain point, then that's it. You will never 'flip over' and start going in the other direction. Similarly, you can not roll your craft. At first though this would be infuriating, after all, how could you spread the damage out across different shields? Well, we'll get to that in a moment.

The actual combat is a major step down from just about every starship sim that there has ever existed. Your shields are treated as one entity. There are no forward/rear/etc shields, so there simply is no "turning the ship to spread out the damage" strategy. Now not being able to loop or roll doesn't seem that bad, since looping or rolling would do zero good. Same with the hull damage, Your ship just has a health bar, that is all. Damage to the nose is the same as damage to aft. Phasers are treated as one entity too. if you fire the forward phasers, you need to wait for them to recharge before you can fire your aft phasers, and so on.
Another annoying thing: Planets in this game seem to have the radius of a starship, and you bounce of them like you were playing with bumper cars. Can you say immersion?

Camera Controls:
Well, there are very, very few, I suppose this section is here to point out that fact. You can look around with the mouse, but that's pretty much it. No zooming in or out.

Legacy has a 'target cam' like many other games (sticks the camera on the target), but unlike just about all of them, its a one time deal, once it points the camera at your target, you are on your own and back to trying to track your target with the oversensitive mouse cam (which is not adjustable, btw).

Maybe I'll Gamefly the 360 version one of these days, as it's clearly the platform this was designed for.

Wired + WoW

There's something to be said about WoW events popping up in Wired, complete with Ghostbusters references.

WoW Insider predicts widespread panic when patch 2.0 gets loose, as it will completely Y2K everyone’s addons.

As everyone begins to realize their addons are no longer functioning, they'll rush to Curse Gaming and WoWInterface. These sites, always sluggish on or around patch day, will all the worse for the complete failure of every addon that currently exists. Some addons will be abandoned by their authors, as the work to rewrite them would be too great. Others will be abandoned because the ability to make them functional will no longer exist. And yet others will simply take time to rewrite and not be immediately available.

What they mean is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together - mass hysteria

Yeah, this patch is certainly going to make many a baby Jesus cry.

Poor Luigi

Borrrowed from GAF:

"Apparently the employees at Akiba Yodobashi mistook this Luigi cosplayer as being an official rep from Nintendo. They had him do the opening ceremonies and present the Wii to the first customer. Shortly thereafter they realized that he was just a regular dude in a Luigi suit and they whisked him away."

I love Japan :)

Gunpey

After spending a few more days with it (and unlocking 7 or so skins), I’ve gotten a few of the nuances down. Like you have to develop the ability to quickly take a segment from the top and bring it down as far as it will go in like under a second. It takes timing to pull off, but is doable. Also, you want to take advantage of posthumous combos, throwing as many segments into your line as possible during the few seconds that the screen is no longer scrolling... this is also a great time to quickly bring segments which are near the top down to a safer level.

Updates

Too much going on lately to spend a lot of time posting. To sumize though...

Picked up Every Extend Extra and Gunpey to ease my puzzle game fix... and apparently wave my Tetsuya Mizuguchi fanboy flag (though interestingly, i've never played Rez)

I'm really digging both games, Gunpey is more of a lumines "play for a long ass time" sort of experience, while EEE offers more of a quick fix, since it's played in bite-sized levels that take no more then 3 minutes to complete.

Still trying to make time for everything and everyone, damn this was easier when i was a lathargic shut-in

Emergence Day

Based on the amount of shit one usually gets when trying to pick up a game on launch day, I allotted myself most of my lunch hour to begin hunting for Gears of War. I expected harassing clerks about shipping times, I expected to be turned away so that they could "teach me a lesson" about what happens to customers who don't preorder, i expected to be nagged about trade-ins and bullshit magazine subscriptions.

But that was not so.

I quite literally stumbled accross a small electronics store in the area that had fairly recent games in the window, so I figured it was worth checking out. The moment I walked in, the guy behind the counter took one look at me and without missing a beat...
"Gears of War, 360?"

Shit, you mean I didn't even have to ask?

I think i'll be visiting this store more often.

Umm, Wii?

So i've heard that the Wii is playable at the Nintedo World Store in NYC... on HDTVs... with Composite connections.

This prompted a friend of mine to ask, "is this fucking N64?"

Lets face it, the Wii isnt making friends based on looks, but hooking it up to an HDTV using the worst possible connection is going to make is look as bad as it possibly could. I don't know about you, but if i were trying to sell a brand new console, I think I would at the very least do everything I could to make it look nice.

Holiday Crunch

My pocket is damp, I believe it's my wallet crying.

Lets see, Lumines 2, Gears of War, Call of Duty 3, and Tony Hawk's Project 8 all ship this week, they are all games that i'm interested in playing. and speaking of game's that i am intersted in, I still haven't picked up Neverwinter Nights 2, i'm feeding my Phantasy Star Universe habit, have barely scratched the surface of Ultimate Alliance, and Chromehounds is still languishing in the Gamefly envelope.

Oh, and WoW, as well as the Burning Crusade Beta, are still beckoning.

I clearly need a plan.

Phantasy Starring

I've been playing an inordinate amount of Phantasy Star Universe lately. The first true sequel to Sega's 2001 Diablo clone, Phantasy Star Online. My experience with PSO all those years ago was conservatory speaking, fantastic, though more accurately, it was life altering. I came out of that experience with great, long lasting friendships. One friend of mine, who when faced with the necessity to leave New York, actually chose his new home with the help of a friend we met in the PSO community. Indeed, on our first trip down to where he would eventually move, we actually got a ride from Atlanta, half way to Greenville, South Carolina from another friend of ours from that same community who had never met us in person before.

These days though, so many of us have moved on from there, I don't believe many of us from the old guard are playing the new game, but I hope that they are out there.