Yeah, that title is correct.
In Yakuza 2 you can walk the streets and get into random scenarios. The one I just encountered was, well weird. Kazuma ran into some thugs blocking the street and not allowing him to pass. So per usual they got beat down for being dicks. What was not usual was what followed. After beating up the cronies a boss character came out of a building. He said that he watched the fight and was impressed by Kazuma's fighting skill and wanted to treat him to a night with a female companion.
Following the boss inside the building Kazuma was confronted by a female who asked him whether he wanted cow milk or breast milk. Curious I selected breast milk. This is when the girl told me that I needed a change of clothes, specifically a change in to a diaper. Yes, a diaper. In the movie that followed Kazuma balked at the idea and attempted to leave when he bumped in to a pseudo wall tearing it down to reveal a nursery. A nursery full of grown men in diapers sucking on pacifiers and getting tickled by "mommys".
Safe to say this was "not Kazuma's thing" and he tired to leave again. The boss was so upset that Kazuma did not accept his offer that he wanted to fight him. This lead to a fight between 7 or 8 diaper guys.
It was weird. It was Japanese.
It was like nothing I've ever seen before.
Fin!
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Thursday, September 25, 2008
I peacocked your mom!
Dam, Kazuma Kiryu is one bad ass mother fucker. I'm playing Yakuza 2 right now, and I just had a funny conversation with a street thug that went something like this:
Thug: Hey you aren't from around here. A guy like you should know your place and quit strutting around like a peacock.
Kazuma: I just peacocked your mom.
Fight ensues. Kazuma proceeds to smash a street sign though his face and finish it off with a healthy stomp of his nuts.
Japan sounds like an awesome place.
Fin!
Thug: Hey you aren't from around here. A guy like you should know your place and quit strutting around like a peacock.
Kazuma: I just peacocked your mom.
Fight ensues. Kazuma proceeds to smash a street sign though his face and finish it off with a healthy stomp of his nuts.
Japan sounds like an awesome place.
Fin!
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
Fun with LBP
OK, so I've made it through the first tutorial stages of the story mode, built a level, and have some impressions I'd like to share.
Firstly this game has some great style, the intro stage which serve the purpose of teaching you how to jump around takes you though a simple course that has pictures (stamps) of all the creators of the game. It's a really neat way of doing credits and it actually makes you want to read these names that otherwise would have probably be skipped over.
Secondly, It can not be overstated how easy the tools are to create objects in your world. From simple items to massive buildings the tools put power at your finger tips.
Lastly, It's all fun. Some creation games (cough cough Spore) get the tools working right, but the rest of the game lacks the "fun factor". So far Little Big Planet has not disappointed.
More when I can pull my-self away.
Fin!
Firstly this game has some great style, the intro stage which serve the purpose of teaching you how to jump around takes you though a simple course that has pictures (stamps) of all the creators of the game. It's a really neat way of doing credits and it actually makes you want to read these names that otherwise would have probably be skipped over.
Secondly, It can not be overstated how easy the tools are to create objects in your world. From simple items to massive buildings the tools put power at your finger tips.
Lastly, It's all fun. Some creation games (cough cough Spore) get the tools working right, but the rest of the game lacks the "fun factor". So far Little Big Planet has not disappointed.
More when I can pull my-self away.
Fin!
Little Big Planet Beta Code.
Yeah, I got one. Thanks Chrome! Your fast loading skills were put to the test against the entirety of the Internet and you won over Firefox hands down.
I'm downloading it now, more to come sooooonnnnnn
FIN!!!!!!!!!!!
Tuesday, September 9, 2008
Spore review.
Will Wright may be considered by some as a genius of the gaming industry. While I have never had a chance to attend any of his talks, I have on occasion watched footage from some of them, and have come to think of him as a theoretical genius. Will is exactly the type of guy you want thinking in a tank about what game concepts could be. Just don't let him actually have an in-depth role on the actual creation process.
Arguably Spore's main draw is the creature creator. It allows you to easily make very distinct and different beings with a lot of personality. Unfortunately unlike the pre-released download not all of the parts are unlocked, and you must actually find them in the world. This limits you to the parts you find by befriending or killing other creatures, and the ones you randomly come across. These parts also have stats associated with them. During your first play through the stats compel you to add on a bunch of goofy crap to improve your stats. However, once you leave stage 3 the stats no longer discernibly affect anything, leaving you with a creature with a bunch of superfluous junk all over them and no way to remove it. In-fact your creature stops evolving all together after the third stage with only a color scheme change to adjust the way it looks.The same creation tools come into effect when you reach the fourth stage and you are tasked with making buildings, cars, planes, and boats. This time however you are given full range of the available pieces to create your master pieces. Like the creature tools there is an impressive range of things that can be made, but unlike the creatures you don't have an emotional involvement with the buildings so the urge to create becomes lessened.
The first part of the game, the cell stage, is disparagingly simple. You guide your little amoeba around to eat stuff by running into it, and run away from bigger organisms. This part is so sparsely challenging that you can beat it in less than 35 minutes just by holding down the left mouse button and pointing.
The second stage is almost as easy as the first; you either make friends with fellow creatures or kill them. Again this stage can be completed in 35 minutes or less by pressing only one button repeatedly.
Stage 3 starts to show a tiny bit more depth by emulating and RTS game. Yet, since it is practically impossible to die or lose all of your creatures it lacks any of the draw of an RTS. Its more like "My First RTS", something that a child, or first time gamer might enjoy for around 10 minutes before labeling it boring and moving on to something else. This is just as good because that’s about as long as it takes to pass this stage. The fourth stage of evolution is just a grander version of stage 3, where you control cars, planes, and boats instead of just creatures.
Stage 4 is the part of the game where it completely unravels. The game ceases to be about your individual creatures and becomes one-hundred percent about the units your creatures pilot. All the time that a person spends into creating their creatures is for naught, as during this stage and beyond you have to really try hard to even see them, and have no reason to do so as you can no longer control them. Stage 4 is actually a challenge. It's a challenge on your will to play the game. The game tries to provide some rudimentary AI routines to attack you, but since they are so predictable it never succeeds in doing anything but wasting your time until stage 5.
Stage 5, the space stage, is the only part of Spore that feels "game like". In this stage you get to travel the cosmos in your quest to dominate the universe. Here is where most people will spend their time; terraforming planets and trading spices, the games resource, with neighboring star systems. But here once again Spore falls flat. The economy in this portion of the game grinds to a snails pace, forcing you to constantly run spices to and from other planets in order to make a modest income so that you may use buy upgrades for the space ship you will pilot. Instead of just having the income roll in, you have to actually move to the planet to gather the spice, and then fly around to various other planets to push your wears. While it sounds simple enough, it becomes a massive chore once you colonize more than one star system.
Also detracting from the experience are the irksome and constant attacks from your enemies. Like clock work every five minutes a message will popup saying that your planets are being attacked. Not just one of your planets, all of them at the same time by multiple enemies. Where you can only control one space ship; your enemies have access to many. The enemy ships constantly out number your's and each of their ships do roughly the same damage as your-self. This forces an attack, retreat to a different planet to heal, and then return to finish them off scenario. Along with your enemies there are random pirate battles between these every five minute attacks, where again you are out numbered seven to one. Now it needs to be said that if you befriend a neighboring star system by buying their allegiance, which cost ten's of millions, you get access to an extra friendly ship by your side. However this ship is just an attack drone with a brain so small that a goldfish would call it a simpleton. It constantly dies and in order to get a replacement you have to go all the way back to the home planet where you got it to receive another one. Throw in the fact that if you do befriend another being, you are forced to do missions for them or they will lose that allegiance, and you get some of the most annoying gameplay around.
So somewhere in the limited time between attacks and running spice you have around one or two minutes to actually explore the universe. And while it is rich with different planets and spices, they might as well all be the same. None of them do anything different then others, they simply look different. Aesthetics aside there is practically no reason to explore the vast universe. It might as well be a handful of planets with pallet swaps instead of a few hundred.
Spore is a game with lofty ideas, and sub-basement gameplay. Its best feature, the creature creator, is hampered by self-imposed limitations and is too soon to lock you into a design that stops evolving. In being a game separated into five distinctly deferent and uniquely un-fun stages it fails to be anything other then a deeply flawed creation toy.
Fin!
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Heavy Rain preview with video footage!
Matt Leone over at 1up has this excellent preview of Heavy Rain:
"Sitting in a meeting room at E3 back in July, I feel like I'm experiencing déjà vu and re-watching the tutorial from Indigo Prophecy. If you played it, you remember: it's the one in which Quantic Dream director David Cage Gorbachevs the fourth wall, shows up as a polygonal character, and tells players what to expect from his ambitious adventure game.
But I'm sitting in that room -- having just signed a nondisclosure agreement saying I wouldn't write any of this until now -- to hear Cage discuss his next project, called Heavy Rain (or as the logo writes it, "Heavy Rain"). Same memorable French-accented voice, same discussion of controls that feed the story, a brighter (orange) shirt, and a game that continues many of the ideas started in Indigo Prophecy -- it's interactive movie class, and I'm ready to learn.
Evolving the thesis
Like any good teacher, Cage starts with a bullet-pointed list, which sounds similar to the one he established last time around: an emotion-driven experience, with mature themes, in which choices matter and the story is the gameplay. The "rubber band stories," which allow players to make decisions but not branch the story off in too drastic a direction, return as well. I come to realize a few minutes into the demonstration that Cage's theories and goals haven't changed much in the past three years (Indigo Prophecy shipped in the U.S. in October 2005), but their execution has evolved considerably.
If there's one place his speech seems to differ, it's when he mentions wanting the game to be "accessible to a broad audience." In some circles, that's code for wanting to sell more copies, but for Cage it seems to come from the desire to simplify the interface and reduce confusion. Case in point: Movement in Heavy Rain doesn't come from the analog stick; it comes from holding down the right trigger (R2), "like in a racing game," says Cage. "Simple. You never get lost. Pressing the button always makes you move forward." The newly freed left analog stick, then, controls your character's head -- and serves as the steering wheel, essentially.
Those having Resident Evil tank-controls-nightmare flashbacks can relax. While button-movement seems strange at first, it solves one of Indigo Prophecy's key control issues. Because that game relied so heavily on cinematic camera angles, as the view changed players often found themselves turning around unintentionally; the camera would shift before they could orientate themselves to the new perspective. With button-movement, that problem disappears, though I'm curious to see how natural it feels to move quickly with this setup.
The rest of the controls have changed a decent bit as well. You still interact with the world around you using the right analog stick (to knock on a door, for instance), but now you make many choices with the Sixaxis' tilt sensor. Walk up to a door and the game will give you three dialogue choices, which you select by physically moving your controller toward them. "What is interesting in this interface is the fact that you are not stuck when you want to talk," says Cage. "In most games, when you want to talk, you enter a cut-scene with fixed cameras, and there's nothing you can do. But here we can move and talk and interact at the same time, like in real life." Using a similar interface, you can pull up a short list of your character's thoughts at any time by holding down L1 and moving the controller to select between them, the idea being that you can ask your character what they are thinking as a way to gain clues or extra information about what's occurring around them.
Proving the concept
You may have noticed my use of "your character" in that last paragraph, rather than "her," despite all of the screenshots thus far showing a female main character. That's because Cage doesn't want to reveal much of anything about the game's story yet, and I don't know whether there will be multiple playable characters in the game like there were in Indigo Prophecy. Heck, I don't even know for sure that Heavy Rain isn't an Indigo Prophecy sequel, though that seems unlikely.
Cage also cautions against reading much into the scene he has running. It shows a female journalist investigating the house of a taxidermist, with her starting outside to search for clues. She eventually makes her way upstairs and discovers murdered women in a room right as the taxidermist arrives home, presenting gameplay where she has to tip-toe and hide to escape without being caught or, ideally, seen. In my experience, it's the closest a game has ever come to feeling like a horror movie, helped significantly by superb visuals and character models as realistic as anything else out there.
After demonstrating the scene once, with a successful escape out the garage door -- and a short laugh at the end when the character's motorcycle takes a few tries to start -- Cage loads the game up a second time to show an alternate approach. This time the character makes noise, so the taxidermist hears her. So she then has to move without getting caught, hearing calls like "Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty" and "Come on, visitor, show me your face" in the background as her heartbeat volume rises. Eventually, the two come face-to-face, and button-pressing minigames appear on the screen for quick movements: tap Triangle to run down stairs, tap Square to hurdle a ledge, jam on Triangle to try to open the garage door, etc. You'll have some control within these sequences -- you can choose different paths by changing your point of view, and you can jump back and forth over the ledge if you want -- but mostly, these scenes continue the theme of making things look as pretty as possible while being simple to control.
Because of the way the scene played out the second time, complete with the taxidermist chasing the character outside as she sped off on her motorcycle, Cage notes that the story surrounding this scene would be different than if things had gone as they did the first time around. It wouldn't be a simple process of sending the police to his house for an arrest because of his awareness. Apparently, there are enough different options that under the right circumstances, you'll even be able to kill the taxidermist.
Next up: the actual game
Once Cage finishes showing this second playthrough, however, he returns to his point about not reading too much into the scene, saying that the full game will feel more like a "dark thriller" than a horror movie. "Imagine many scenes like this, each one having a different context, a different scenario," he says. "I don't want you to believe that Heavy Rain is a story of serial killers, and you're stuck in many houses, and you need to escape, and each time it's the same game."
Yet with little more than a promise of "themes never used in games before," I find myself as excited for the game as I have been for any in recent memory, and the majority of that comes from the similarities to Indigo Prophecy. That game wasn't without its faults, but conceptually, it was incredibly refreshing, and it's rare to see a game that experimental with a significant budget behind it, which added up to one of the most memorable games I've ever played. And now to see that approach evolve, with some of the best graphics in the industry, makes Heavy Rain hard not to like.
I'm not sure if my excitement comes from Quantic Dream's talent, or because they are the only ones attempting games of this sort, but there's something important worth paying attention to here"
_________________________________
Now that you've read that, go ahead and watch this footage from Leipzig:
The footage shows the same type of interactive cut-scenes that are now combined with some of the best, and most realistic graphics this side of Crysis. Hold on to your controllers folks, this game is shaping up to be one of the best, ever.
FIN!
"Sitting in a meeting room at E3 back in July, I feel like I'm experiencing déjà vu and re-watching the tutorial from Indigo Prophecy. If you played it, you remember: it's the one in which Quantic Dream director David Cage Gorbachevs the fourth wall, shows up as a polygonal character, and tells players what to expect from his ambitious adventure game.
But I'm sitting in that room -- having just signed a nondisclosure agreement saying I wouldn't write any of this until now -- to hear Cage discuss his next project, called Heavy Rain (or as the logo writes it, "Heavy Rain"). Same memorable French-accented voice, same discussion of controls that feed the story, a brighter (orange) shirt, and a game that continues many of the ideas started in Indigo Prophecy -- it's interactive movie class, and I'm ready to learn.
Evolving the thesis
Like any good teacher, Cage starts with a bullet-pointed list, which sounds similar to the one he established last time around: an emotion-driven experience, with mature themes, in which choices matter and the story is the gameplay. The "rubber band stories," which allow players to make decisions but not branch the story off in too drastic a direction, return as well. I come to realize a few minutes into the demonstration that Cage's theories and goals haven't changed much in the past three years (Indigo Prophecy shipped in the U.S. in October 2005), but their execution has evolved considerably.
If there's one place his speech seems to differ, it's when he mentions wanting the game to be "accessible to a broad audience." In some circles, that's code for wanting to sell more copies, but for Cage it seems to come from the desire to simplify the interface and reduce confusion. Case in point: Movement in Heavy Rain doesn't come from the analog stick; it comes from holding down the right trigger (R2), "like in a racing game," says Cage. "Simple. You never get lost. Pressing the button always makes you move forward." The newly freed left analog stick, then, controls your character's head -- and serves as the steering wheel, essentially.
Those having Resident Evil tank-controls-nightmare flashbacks can relax. While button-movement seems strange at first, it solves one of Indigo Prophecy's key control issues. Because that game relied so heavily on cinematic camera angles, as the view changed players often found themselves turning around unintentionally; the camera would shift before they could orientate themselves to the new perspective. With button-movement, that problem disappears, though I'm curious to see how natural it feels to move quickly with this setup.
The rest of the controls have changed a decent bit as well. You still interact with the world around you using the right analog stick (to knock on a door, for instance), but now you make many choices with the Sixaxis' tilt sensor. Walk up to a door and the game will give you three dialogue choices, which you select by physically moving your controller toward them. "What is interesting in this interface is the fact that you are not stuck when you want to talk," says Cage. "In most games, when you want to talk, you enter a cut-scene with fixed cameras, and there's nothing you can do. But here we can move and talk and interact at the same time, like in real life." Using a similar interface, you can pull up a short list of your character's thoughts at any time by holding down L1 and moving the controller to select between them, the idea being that you can ask your character what they are thinking as a way to gain clues or extra information about what's occurring around them.
Proving the concept
You may have noticed my use of "your character" in that last paragraph, rather than "her," despite all of the screenshots thus far showing a female main character. That's because Cage doesn't want to reveal much of anything about the game's story yet, and I don't know whether there will be multiple playable characters in the game like there were in Indigo Prophecy. Heck, I don't even know for sure that Heavy Rain isn't an Indigo Prophecy sequel, though that seems unlikely.
Cage also cautions against reading much into the scene he has running. It shows a female journalist investigating the house of a taxidermist, with her starting outside to search for clues. She eventually makes her way upstairs and discovers murdered women in a room right as the taxidermist arrives home, presenting gameplay where she has to tip-toe and hide to escape without being caught or, ideally, seen. In my experience, it's the closest a game has ever come to feeling like a horror movie, helped significantly by superb visuals and character models as realistic as anything else out there.
After demonstrating the scene once, with a successful escape out the garage door -- and a short laugh at the end when the character's motorcycle takes a few tries to start -- Cage loads the game up a second time to show an alternate approach. This time the character makes noise, so the taxidermist hears her. So she then has to move without getting caught, hearing calls like "Kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty" and "Come on, visitor, show me your face" in the background as her heartbeat volume rises. Eventually, the two come face-to-face, and button-pressing minigames appear on the screen for quick movements: tap Triangle to run down stairs, tap Square to hurdle a ledge, jam on Triangle to try to open the garage door, etc. You'll have some control within these sequences -- you can choose different paths by changing your point of view, and you can jump back and forth over the ledge if you want -- but mostly, these scenes continue the theme of making things look as pretty as possible while being simple to control.
Because of the way the scene played out the second time, complete with the taxidermist chasing the character outside as she sped off on her motorcycle, Cage notes that the story surrounding this scene would be different than if things had gone as they did the first time around. It wouldn't be a simple process of sending the police to his house for an arrest because of his awareness. Apparently, there are enough different options that under the right circumstances, you'll even be able to kill the taxidermist.
Next up: the actual game
Once Cage finishes showing this second playthrough, however, he returns to his point about not reading too much into the scene, saying that the full game will feel more like a "dark thriller" than a horror movie. "Imagine many scenes like this, each one having a different context, a different scenario," he says. "I don't want you to believe that Heavy Rain is a story of serial killers, and you're stuck in many houses, and you need to escape, and each time it's the same game."
Yet with little more than a promise of "themes never used in games before," I find myself as excited for the game as I have been for any in recent memory, and the majority of that comes from the similarities to Indigo Prophecy. That game wasn't without its faults, but conceptually, it was incredibly refreshing, and it's rare to see a game that experimental with a significant budget behind it, which added up to one of the most memorable games I've ever played. And now to see that approach evolve, with some of the best graphics in the industry, makes Heavy Rain hard not to like.
I'm not sure if my excitement comes from Quantic Dream's talent, or because they are the only ones attempting games of this sort, but there's something important worth paying attention to here"
_________________________________
Now that you've read that, go ahead and watch this footage from Leipzig:
The footage shows the same type of interactive cut-scenes that are now combined with some of the best, and most realistic graphics this side of Crysis. Hold on to your controllers folks, this game is shaping up to be one of the best, ever.
FIN!
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
I'm a lead farmer mother fucker!
Robert Downey Jr. is quite possible the funnest man alive today. Tropic Thunder proves this statement in full. I recommend that everyone see this movie as soon as possible.
Run, run to the theater and see the best film this year.
Fin!
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