I bought Resident Evil 4 as soon as it came out (on GameCube, a-duh), and loved the hell out of it. The game did a wonderful job at retaining the spooky atmosphere of the previous entries in the series proper while fixing some of the more glaring technical shortcomings (not even the diehard RE fans actually liked the fixed camera angles and inability to see where you were shooting half the time). The overall proliferation of ammunition and weaponry did nothing to reduce the sheer terror that comes when you’re down to your last shotgun shell in a crowded room of zombies Spanish-speaking Eastern European peasants and you have to decide whether to run or whip out the knife. I watched the story unravel, the enemies grow tougher, and the plot twists, uh, twist. I was having a blast.
But then I got stuck.
I (as Leon) walked into a nondescript room at the end of a long dining hall. A treasure chest stood in the center, but as I approached it, a cage lowered from the ceiling, trapping me with a Garrador. Of all the scary sights in this game, the creepy Chainsaw Man, the freakishly fast and deadly Colmillos, even the oppressive El Gigante, nothing scares me more than the Garrador. I don’t know what it is about them, but unless I’ve got a wide berth, I tend to panic and forget that they’re not actually terribly difficult to fight. The cage gives you no space to make a break for it, forcing you to deal with your immediate surroundings in the few seconds before the Garrador hears you and slices your head clean off. For whatever reason, I kept panicking and focusing on the wrong targets, trying to pick off the annoying zealots firing crossbows at me from outside the cage. The doors outside are secured with padlocks, and I was consistently being picked off by that God-damned Garrador.
I can’t believe I didn’t think to shoot the padlock.
I feel so silly admitting that here. I keep telling myself, There were padlocks to shoot earlier in the game! Why wouldn’t you retain that knowledge, fool? But my irrational panic in the presence of the Garrador made me completely ignore this glaring oversight on my part. Paul had mentioned this little strategy to me in passing recently, and I begrudgingly spun up the game disk for the first time in months and found that, yes, this solved the problem perfectly. Now I was free to pick off the zealots while the Garrador blindly ran around inside the cage, and could take him out from the outside without worrying about him charging at me. Finally I moved on! Go me!
Then I ran out of ammo in a fight with two Los Gigantes and died trying to cut their shins up with my knife. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.
I can just hear that blind bastard taunting me in my dreams. Fuck you, Garrador.
I don’t remember the exact path I took to get to Sexy Videogameland (I’m sure we’ve all played the blog click-through game once or twice), but it sure as hell paid off. Michel Gagné (awesome animator, worked on some classic Don Bluth flicks) is making a sweet-looking shooter game. A video would probably explain its awesomeness best:
Purdy, ain’t it? Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet doesn’t have a publisher yet, but keep an eye on the official site, hopefully something will be announced soon. I wants. I know it’s probably too soon to speculate, but the fluid motions of the ship in this teaser video sure do look like they’d work well with a Wiimote.
… Smashville may be my favorite Smash Bros. stage ever!
When I choose an arena in which to do battle with friend and foe alike in the Smash Bros. series, I will generally lean toward a large flat stage without any random events. It bugs me when I’m going toe-to-toe with someone, and suddenly an Arwing blasts at us from behind and upsets the balance of the match, or the stage scrolls upward too fast for one of the players to jump to the next platform (like that even makes sense logistically; how would the battlers know where the camera was looking at any given moment? Only assholes think Icicle Mountain is a fun stage). Final Destination is of course the best option when available.
But the new Smashville level announced on the Smash Bros. Dojo like an hour ago combines my love of non-obtrusive flat level design with my possibly even bigger love of Animal Crossing. This is totally awesome! Townsfolk drink coffee in the background while watching the battle! Totakeke jams with some tunes Saturday nights at 8! Gracie’s standing around with her fancy car, and is a total bitch! I hate you Gracie, I hate you so much.
Gracie taunts me in my dreams.
Uh, yeah, Smashville rocks hard. Play there all day every day.
I’ve got good Marathon news, and I’ve got bad Marathon news:
The good news is that Marathon: Durandal is being updated for the next-generation, with support for HD graphics, new online multiplayer modes and leaderboards. Long-time Mac game developer Freeverse (formally Freeverse Software) is heading the project.
The bad news is that it’s only coming to Xbox Live Arcade.
I suppose those of you that love your Xbox 360s will get a big kick out of this, and have worlds of fun kicking Pfhor ass through the night. It’s bad enough that Microsoft took Bungie away from the Mac platform, but to take away our classic Mac games is just cruel.
Stef and I like to play video games communally. By that I mean that if one of us is playing a single-player game, the other likes to sit and watch. On console games, this works like a charm: we’ve got a (decently-sized) TV that both of us can view unobstructed. But when we want to play some Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, it’s a difficult affair to say the least. The DS screens don’t have very good horizontal viewing angles, so we had to keep tilting the system back and forth to be on the same page. Sometimes I read the dialogue aloud.
Not all that fun.
So now I’m reading through GamesAreFun’s liveblog of Sony’s E3 2007 keynote, and I see that a new version of the PSP is coming along with the ability to output video to a television. This is just what I want! … on the DS (I don’t really care much one way or the other what the loser PSP can do, except for TV-out of course). Nintendo, if you’re reading this blog (which is totally likely), please release an also-ran DS with TV-out support! I didn’t buy the DS Lite, but I’d buy this in a heartbeat!
The video highlights what appear to be early conceptual versions of character creation (this sequence actually would probably be easy to implement in-game), the workshop (vehicle-building; that guy can build vehicles really fast) and the city (which looks far too chaotic and freeform to be anything but pre-rendered video). Despite the whole thing clearly being a big ol’ teaser, I’m still quite psyched. The mixing of LEGO eras (like seeing the medieval dragon in the city) is gonna be a lot of fun. Of course, a lot of questions remain to be answered. Here’s a big one: what are we players going to do all day in this expansive interactive world? I’m guessing it ain’t gonna be an RPG as we commonly know it (no slaying LEGO boars for quick EXP), though I’d certainly enjoy some kind of level-up aspect. I’ll keep you posted when I learn more.
Jeff (from The Orange Belt forums) pointed out this nifty little piece of gamercraft via Craftster: a sewn Nintendo Entertainment System! The attention to detail is commendable, though I’d really like to know how big the system is. It’s hard to tell with felted crafts sometimes, especially when there’s nothing in the photos to use as a frame of reference. Of course, this doesn’t diminish the project’s awesomeness in the slightest. Make sure you check out the rest of the photos in the Craftster thread, it really is a wonderful piece.
(I’m not gonna dupe-post every piece of artwork posted on Gamercraft, but this was too cool for school.)
I’ll go ahead and throw the big ol’ “rumor” label up here to be safe. Word on the (mean) streets (of IGN) is that the PS3 build of Beautiful Katamari has been shelved in favor of a brand-spankin’ new Wii version! This pleases me greatly, though I really ought to keep telling myself that rumors aren’t the same thing as product announcements (I learned my lesson getting all hyped up for Katamari on the DS; oh how I miss you, non-existent Katamari DS). I also should probably be a little worried about quality control, as I heard that the PSP game (lacking any involvement from series creator Keita Takahashi) was not quite as… Katamarity? as the previous titles. I never played that game, obviously, so if someone wants to counter me with an “it’s totally awesome wtf man”, feel free.
Certainly the control scheme would have to be a little different, but I don’t really think that’s much of a deal-breaker. Question: would using the Remote and Nunchuck as analogs (har har) for left and right DualShock sticks be okay? I think that might be okay, if the Nunchuck has decent-enough tilt-sensing. It seems to detect fairly subtle movements when I’m doing victory dances in Wii Sports Boxing, anyway.
Rumor rumor rumor. Don’t place too much stock in it! Still, it’s totally awesome that there will for sure be a Katamari game on the Wii.
But then I got stuck.
… Smashville may be my favorite Smash Bros. stage ever!
Jeff (