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.

Gorgeous Hair's review of Playstation's HOME



im in this room
and i have some couches
and there's nothing else in it
so i throw my couches around
but it's not fun
so i go out on my balcony
and i can't jump off it
so i go out the room, and it says loading lobby
so i quit
and will never go back in a gain
i want to say "dear playstation home, do you realize you made crap ?"

Good at Games

Does it matter, getting good at games?

You can argue that J0h@n@+han "Fatal1ty" W3nd311 profits from being good at games. He makes a decent salary. That makes game playing his job, however. I know a lot of people with better jobs because they decided to get good at things other than video games, so the argument is somewhat moot.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the last game I had to make an effort at. It wasn't a significant effort. I spent an extra day scrounging up every last free man and patiently beat the last level. I'm pretty good at BC:R now but I have no interest in playing it on hard mode or anything else at this point. I have no idea what was the last game I worked hard to master. Even with Tekken I get by more on my accrued skill over the six games than any concerted effort to master my wall game or something.

And what's the point really? Most games out there currently require zero skill. This is every RPG, MMORPG and everything else. Sure Omega Weapon was hard, but it's a numbers game, not a skill game.

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was the last game I had to get good at, from scratch and properly. I even got most of the way through the Hurricane Pack, but then too, at a certain point I asked myself, what is the point?

An Aside About Post-Campaign Replay

My decision to stop playing both Disgaea and The World Ends With You came for a similar reason. In both cases there's plenty of game after you've beaten the "final" boss. What killed TWE for me was the "black planet" pins, which are the best weapons/items in the game. The problem is that to get one of them, you have to fight the hardest enemy in the entire game, making the use for them rather moot.

So what do you do with them? Re fight that boss only it's easier now?

The longer you play something post-game, the more you ask yourself "what is the point?"

With Eindhander, my quest to get the Selene led to me getting much better at the game, but in RPG's you the game player never get better; your characters in the game get better at playing it. That's a weird meta-situation right there if you stop and think about it: You're watching people play a game. Your involvement is only to be there to tell the characters to get back to work. It's as though there was some sort of God telling me to keep playing Einhander till I was leveled up enough to beat the game on Hard without continuing.

That's some weird business right there, now that I think about it.

Dead Space

I haven't played it, but I just talked to Gorgeous Hair on the phone about it. He's been playing it and called it a solid 3 star game but was waiting till it was over to see if it held up. Hopefully he'll get around to writing about it himself, but for now, i'll paraphrase:

Last level sucks, Last boss is cool, ending is a slap in the face

2 stars

Einhander

Since I mentioned it down below, I might as well cover it.

You're a space ship, you fly to the right and shoot things.

Squaresoft was magical back in these days. They were good at everything they tried to be good at. Who can say why someone there decided to make a shooter, and lord knows why it got greenlit in the Lucasarts of the East, but it did, and it's amazing.

Einhander takes everything that was previously right about shooters (dying a lot, memorization of enemy patterns, insanity) and does it even better. Bosses, mini bosses, it's all so good. While some will say some other horizontal shooter's better, I will say they are wrong. While i love Gradius 5, it's not nearly as epic or as brilliantly laid out as this.

4 stars, and in the "Desert Island" competition

Disgaea 2

First off, Disgaea 1: 3 stars. Not for everybody, but a great story and a just stupid amount of post-story gameplay.

Disgaea 2's story's not as good, or at least not as whimsical which is really the charm of Disgaea games, outside of the mathgasm anyway.

But about that mathgasm, some things about the Disgaea series:

- Max character level: 9999
- number of 'stored levels' you can accrue (this involves reincarnating back to level 1 but with more powerful base stats based on the number of levels you have 'stored') 19,998. (what this basically means is that to make your character as powerful as possible, you will have to level it to 9,999 three times)
- Every item, from a lowly piece of candy (for healing) to the great sword Yoshitsuna has levels inside of it. You can go inside the item, beat randomly generated maps populated by random enemies and level up the item. Every item. Items have between 30 and 100 levels (Per Item!) depending on rarity.
- To get the best weapons and armor (class 40) you have to:

- Buy or find a class 38 weapon or item and go into it. In this "Item World" you'll need to find steal a very rare version of a class 39 weapon, which may or may not show up randomly, pretty much anyhere if the enemy level is high enough in whatever item you are inside.
- Go into said class 39 weapon and level it all the way down to level 99 of 100.
- Collect the 16 pieces of treasure map from the 16 types of pirate that randomly show up after a few turns on any given level in the item world.
- Go to the new "Land of Chaos" opened up by finding all the map parts, going back into your class 39 weapon on it's 99th level, going to level 100 and stealing the class 40 weapon from the "Item God" that resides on the 100th level.

I currently have 15 of the 16 map pieces.

I understand the formation of religions a little better. Everyone says it's random, but there has to be something. Maybe it looks on the clock? Maybe the Jolly Pirates are much more likely to show up on Thursdays? Maybe only when the sun's up? There has to be something to give me an edge other than trying to roll a seven over and over and over again.

2 stars, at least until I get that last map piece.


Got the map piece. Now I have two "Yoshitsuna" swords. The thing I'm finding now is that while Disgaea has always been far less about "strategy" than say, Fire Emblem, it's also becoming embarassingly apparent how rote everything about the game is.

You could not convince a man from twenty years ago that anyone would have fun doing this, and while I do and may even take all 10-plus hours it takes to "perfect" a Yoshitsuna, it's still a horrid waste of time.

I used to be mad that in Einhander (4 stars if I haven't covered it yet) to get the ultimate ship, the Selene (9999 of any given ammo, dual gunpods) you had to beat the game, on hard, without continuing (which I never did). Now I don't know. Disgaea is the opposite. The game keeps going and while there are super hard enemies to fight, there's basically no reward (other than possibly bragging to the one other dude who's even heard of the game that you know, and truth be told he's not impressed, he's freaked out). The Selene may have been nigh-impossible to get, but I did get super good at Hard Mode because of it.

2 stars. 3 if you're into strat rpg-esque games.