Fallout 3

I had no intention of playing Fallout 3. Gorgeous Hair said he was going to wait till the "game of the year" edition came out, and he kept to his word. Purdy Teeth, GH and I were hanging out playing it shortly after he got it. The next day Purdy Teeth owned a copy. Two days later, I did.

That's excessive, by any measure. It's a damn old game now, but none of us was willing to wait to borrow the game. Do I regret spending that money when I could have waited a month and borrowed it from either of them? Nope.

Fallout 3 is nothing short of fantastic. It makes every RPG I've played in the past decade seem impossibly archaic. The fact that Final Fantasy 13 is going to come out next year with a "you stand there, I'll stand here, I'll hop over and hit you, now you hop over and hit me" battle system is pathetic. This game is everything a RPG should be.

A small example: Megaton is a town with an unexploded nuke in the center of it. The mayor would love it if you'd disarm it. You can either do it for free for good karma, or you can charge for the service. Mister Burke would like you to detonate it, and he will pay you much better than the mayor. You can do either of those things. You can kill Burke, and you can kill the mayor. You can get the mayor to arrest Burke, and have Burke kill the mayor for you. And everything in the game is structured like this. There's no one path. Not even close. Now that all three of us are playing it, we've been amazed at how different each of our games is. We fight with different weapons, run with different people, do different quests.

The game's huge, dense and a joy to exist in. All other RPG's have been put on notice.

4 stars

Tekken 6

Problems (Obvious): Laggy Online
Problems (Nitpicky but I care more):

- No ability to set vs mode to automatically go back to character select, and as a subset, only p1 can choose whether to rematch or reselect characters.
- Online VS, when it dumps you back to the character select screen forgets the character you were playing as and resets to hovering over Lars.
- Music is so-so
- Backgrounds are limited and lacking much of the whimsy and magic that Tekken 5 had. Some are great (Tomato Stage, Temple) but there's too few and too many duds.
- The glow is aaaawwwwful. Try playing Lili on the tree stage to see what I'm talking about. She's a white blob. I can shut off Motion Blur, why not Glow?

Things I like:

- It's Tekken
- Character models and designs are stellar. No seriously. This game does such a better job than every other fighter out there with their character design it's obscene. There's not much new on the default costume front (everyone's in their Tekken 5 gear, which is admittedly lame), but the customizations are excellent. Between making Nina a flight attendant and Bob a fat Power Ranger, there's lots of amazing looking options.
- Scenario mode may be a mediocre Final Fight clone, but it's a much nicer way to earn custom items and money than playing against the computer for days on end. It would have been even better had they done something like Virtua Fighter 4 Evo's quest mode, or Soul Calibur's for that matter; keeping the core gameplay while sending you on an interesting adventure (where you win lots of clothes).

So yeah, do I think they could have done better? Yup. Will it be my favorite fighting game for the next two or three years? Yup.

3 stars

Tekken 6 on Xbox or Playstation?

Tekken 6 is coming out multiplatform in October. They're offering what is rumored to be a wireless Hori Real Arcade Pro. Even if it's wired, that's a fantastic joystick.

I've always gotten my Tekken (and other fighters) on the Sony system of the time. This is primarily due to my love of Tekken over all other fighters and the fact that I have acquired some nice arcade sticks to play it on Playstation.

Getting Tekken 6 on PS3 seems like a no-brainer. I've got some PS3 compatable sticks, the game was built on an arcade version of PS3 hardware (I think) and Japanese games tend to be better on Japanese systems.

Except that's not exactly true anymore. Resident Evil 5 was noticeably better looking (to both me and Gorgeous Hair) on Xbox 360 and it had no mandatory install. The head-to-heads of Soul Calibur 4 say the game is nearly indistinguishable across systems but slightly better looking on Xbox.

This is compounded by the fact that Sony hasn't done one thing right since the PS3 came out. Despite having a purportedly much faster processor, there has been no indication of that from any game, cross platform or exclusive. Half the games require installs (and in the impossibly offensive example of Metal Gear 4, require one install per level.) and neither load faster or look better.

Other than the rather slim odds that the game will look better on PS3 (which I doubt based on the Soul Calibur reviews) there's no more reason to get the game on PS3.

So as of this week, I'm getting a Tekken game on a non-Sony system. It reminds me of buying a PS1 to play Final Fantasy 7.

Recession Reviews: Burnout Revenge

Burnout Revenge, the fourth in the series (i think?) is, on the Xbox 360, effectively an up-resed xbox/ps2 game. Having bought the ps2 version after having played the 360 version but prior to owning a 360, I can tell you the 360 version is way better.

All the little details are better utilized and developed.

It also looks great. As good as Paradise or Gran Turismo? No way, but it looks sharp, has a smooth framerate and it's fast as hell. It's also an order of magnitude better than Burnout Paradise. As much as I respect everything they've done DLC-wise to make Paradise awesome, I still hate the open-world mechanic. I hate open worlds in general because instead of taking the fun part of a game and just giving you that, they let you do all the boring stuff too, like getting from place to place.

Revenge does everyting better than Paradise. To start with, the driving is simple. Gas, Brake and Boost. No handbrake nonsense, and no need to ever ever take your finger off the gas, for any reason. The arcadey feel for speed and control is superb.

Then there's different signature takedowns for each course, different kinds of takedowns (including my favorite: landing on top of your rival), and you can take down at least four opponents at once, which is rare, but I did it and it felt fantastic. This game is actually why I'm so hard on Paradise, which is in and of itself a fantastic racer. But Revenge is better. It's more focused, more compartmentalized and very much more menu driven, which is the only downer. Not that the menus are bad, just that after every race the "you did this good" screen isn't skippable and like most games, I just wanna get back in and play.

That is my only complaint about it though. I bought a "like-new" copy off Amazon the other day for $15 shipped cos I thought I lost my old one. It was over at Purdy Teeth's house. I wish I had known that when I was sitting around doing nothing while the wife was out of town.

4 stars.

Recession Reviews: Crackdown

Due to the utter slop that calls itself the games of 2009 so far I have bought exactly 1 game: Resident Evil 5. Having milked that one to death (1000 GP to be specific), I decided rather than go out and get Prototype or Infamous and be unhappy with how Crackdown does X or Y better I'd just fire up crackdown and achievement whore.

Turns out I made a good decision. My old old copy of crackdown is still fantastically fun, and doubly so when I got Gorgeous Hair to play online. We decided to call our session quits at 1am last night, but for the next hour neither of us signed off. We just jumped around the city and accomplished nothing, and we had a great time doing it.

My middling complaints about the game still hold up (lack of bosses, touchy controls), but it does so much right that every other game does wrong, and at least until Prototype and Infamous came out was the only sandbox game that understood a game should be a game first and a life simulator second. It's still fantastic fun to climb all the tall buildings, to launch an attack on a boss and to generally raise hell.

You can easily find it for under $20 shipped, and it's still a solid 3 star game.

Resident Evil 5

I don't feel like writing a ton on it at the moment, but it's a gorgeous game, I've played it through six or seven times and gotten okay at the minigame "mercenaries".

Gorgeous Hair and I have plans to play a bit of co-op, which I'm looking forward to.

3 stars

Street Fighter 4

I had a dream last night where I'd made an awesome new friend. He only had one problem: he constantly pooped his pants. Being in his company was being in his poopy pants' company, and it was ruining an otherwise awesome time. Eventually I had to man up in my dream and ask him about the issue.

"What, you mean Seth?" was his response.

He'd named his unfortunate affliction "Seth", and so it's fitting that Capcom decided to name their instance of pants crapping amidst otherwise good times "Seth" as well. Seth is the last boss in Street Fighter 4 and he sucks. I didn't quite believe it when everyone cried "cheap!". After spending half an hour fighting Seth with Gen on "Easiest" difficulty I fully understood.

Gorgeous Hair and I unlocked everyone. It was some of the least fun I've ever had with a video game. I have zero desire to play the game anymore.


2 stars

So I've been playing EDF again

My friend Matt got a new XBL name. The best feature of this is that you lose all your old saves. Awesome.

So he's been going through EDF again, and I've been helping him. The game is just fantastic. We've been farming for weapons on Level 52 "Inferno" on the "Inferno" difficulty. Confusing, yes. Inferno Inferno. We're barely strong enough to do it, but one out of every two or three times we succeed in beating the level. It's much more fun than hunting for the Lysander Z on level 46, which gets rather boring.

What amazes me about the game is how you can have everything under complete control, yet things can still go to hell in second if you're not constantly on top of things.

So in this one case, thank you Xbox, for deleting my friend's saves.

still, as always, 4 stars.

DLC pricing and unlockables

Street Fighter 4 is (or will be?) selling costume packs for around a buck per character. While I appreciate the option to unlock new costumes, paying for things that a game used to give out for free is utter nonsense.

In Dead or Alive 1 through 3 you have to play through the game again and again on higher and higher difficulties to unlock different costumes for characters. In Tekken 5 you play through the game to earn game-money which you can use to spend on unlockable costumes. In Virtua Fighter items are unlocked in a somewhat similar manner, with some being paid for and others being won via matches.

I like the old system. I don't want to be forced to pay for new content. This is especially true for fighting games where the gameplay is rather thin outside of having friends over. Sure there's online play, but I've never found it terribly satisfying. Unlocking goofy hats is pretty much my only reason to play 1p fighters. I'm good enough at the ones I feel like getting good at, and playing the computer's never been very much help in that regard anyway.

My only problem with this old system is that it gets to be a huge pain. Beating DOA 3 on some super high difficulty is next to impossible for me, and while I can fight all day in Tekken 5, the money you earn is middling at best. I get bored of unlocking stuff. At that point, I become completely okay with paying real, actual cash to have all the costumes and customizations unlocked in my game. My time becomes worth more than my money.

What I'd like to see is a hybrid of the two systems. Allow me, should I so choose, to unlock everything without paying money. Let me slog through as much of the game as I want. When I get bored of that however, let me pay to unlock everything.

This would be a great system for every game. I don't have the patience anymore to unlock everything in most games anymore, but I would like to feel like I'm purchasing a whole game. Adding $5 downloads onto a game shortly after it comes out only serves to give the impression of nickel-and-diming the consumer.

"Here's your 'Street Fighter 4 Basic' game, please pay another Twenty Bucks to get 'Street Fighter 4 Complete'."

I think most people will still end up paying for DLC, but no one would feel taken advantage of. I know if I could pay another $5 or $10 to unlock all the things I haven't in my copy of Tekken 5:DR, I would do that. I wouldn't have done that the day I bought the game, but now I've had it long enough that spending more money on it isn't offensive to me, and I just don't have the desire to fight enough matches to unlock all the hairstyles for the characters I don't play.

Earth Defense Force 2017 is still the best game on the market

seriously.

find a copy. You should probably find a friend too, cos like Contra, it's playable as a 1p game, but it's magical as a 2p game.

PS3 Home

A few years back I was at a shooting range. My friend asked if they had the Smith and Wesson .50 caliber.

"That gun's the answer to a question nobody asked." came the reply.

To this day, I love that phrase.

And so we have Playstation's Home.

I didn't get much past creating my "avatar". I tried to create my wife but it became apparent that creating attractive women wasn't in the cards and semi-attractive zombie women's not really my thing, so I switched gears to make myself. I have enough skill and confidence to make good caricatures of myself: harsh but amusing. Nonetheless, I could only manage the bluntest caveman version of myself.

Mostly, Home's character creator is lacking foreheads, or tops of heads specifically. Every hairstyle I tried on both virtual me and virtual wife failed moreso because of the decidedly cro-magnon lack of upper head than because of the wrinkles, dead eyes or awful style choices. We looked too cavman, and this coming from a man who thinks he looks more caveman than the average person.

I effectively gave up on creating me, and went out to explore this amazing new world. I appeared in a highrise apartment on the coast of a digital Saint Tropez. Running out to my porch, excited to jump off the edge and explore I found there was no jump button. My next observation was that my male avatar runs like a beaten child--very compactly.

Run animations are a big thing for me, and I won't get too into it here, but when a person is running they should look two things in videogame land:
1. Healthy
2. Their sex

Women and men run differently and it would behoove many a game maker to notice and master the differences. But anyway, I take my weak running man who can't jump the railing to the front door.

I get a message that to walk out of my apartment I'll have to download an additional 22 megs of whatever.

No thanks.

That's the end of my Home experience.

It's not a game, so doesn't technically merit a rating, but it's terrible enough that I'll give it one.

1 star


edit: I just re-read Gorgeous Hair's review. Haha.